


(there are no) monsters like me

by caelzorah



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Body mutilation, Cannibalism, F/F, PTSD, rated explicit because wow this may be the most casually graphic thing i've ever written, what do you mean "season three"? i've never heard of such a thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-05-24 20:37:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6165991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelzorah/pseuds/caelzorah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mountain will haunt her for the rest of this life, but when she watches Pike’s men rip into the charred human flesh – crispy and blackened on the outside but still bloody enough inside to leave a trail down their chins – she knows that this vision will follow her well into the next one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Em prompted me on [tumblr](http://caelzorah.tumblr.com): "Clarke gets picked up by Farm Station when she's on the run. she feels like something's kinda off but ignores it because Arkers. which is kinda unfortunate, cause it means she's caught off guard when they try to eat her."
> 
> I agreed because - what do you mean "season three"? Also, we're both going to hell.

Pike is different when she meets him again - wide-eyed and glaring at the end of her knife, gaunt around the eyes, bundled in furs to hide the lack of mass underneath. Clarke can tell these things immediately: the ground has hardened him, like everyone else, but he is hungry and it shows in his eyes.

It’s ironic, really, that the Arkers most focussed on food production should starve to death. Still, he looks mostly the same, and when the recognition sinks in Clarke coaxes her rabid paranoia back into it’s cage and lowers her blade.

‘Pike,’ she says. ‘You didn’t come down with Alpha Station. I thought you were dead.’

He regards her as though she is the first face he has seen on the ground, as though she is more than she is: salvation, livelihood, deliverance standing.

There is a cut on his neck where the razor edge of her dagger bit into his skin and Clarke watches the liquid bubble and roll down his skin to disappear beneath the cut of his furs. She wonders how he got so many, tailored well enough to fit his shoulders, when he is so obviously starving – but he is from the Ark, he is from her life before the ground, and she _knows_ she can trust him.

‘They landed?’ he asks.

‘They’re fine,’ she tells him dryly. ‘They’ve built walls, grown crops. Maybe three weeks from here by foot. How many of you are there?’

‘Sixty-three,’ Pike says. ‘Can you take us to them?’

‘If that’s what you want,’ she agrees – because she abandoned her people, but it was not for lack of caring. ‘I can show you the way.’

He leads her back to his camp and she ignores the way his people stumble through the trees around them, trying to pretend that they are not there and will not try to kill her with the slightest wrong move. It will not do to let them know where they can improve until she knows for a fact that they should.

Pike doesn’t ask why she is out in the woods alone; Clarke doesn’t ask why only sixty-three of his three hundred people remain. The reason for this is obvious: neither is sure that they want to know the answer.

 

\--

 

These things become very quickly clear about the Farm Station survivors: they are starved, they are desperate, and they are ruthless.

They welcome her with tired, joyful smiles when she crosses the invisible border into their camp. They emerge from brown-stained tents of canvas and fur and flock towards her, reaching out to touch her skin as though their dirty fingers have frozen and the warmth of her well-fed body will rekindle their own. They watch her like she is prophet sent from the heavens to guide them to the holy lands, a deity of their life yet to come. It is absolute reverence, as though the sight of her blesses them, as though they can do nothing but consume her presence with pious greed.

It is unsettling, but by this point she has seen stranger things: men who steal the blood of children in order to breathe the air, literate minds turned rabid for want of bloody glory injected in their veins, broken young women charged to lead wars in the wake of their own broken hearts.

Pike leads her to a tent in the centre of his camp and tells her to settle by the fire outside it while he goes in to fetch his map. His people retreat – away from the fire, away from Clarke, back to their tents and the trees surrounding them, back to the shadows as though the light of the fire repels them. Pike returns quickly with his map and a stick of charcoal, and Clarke is almost idle when she tells him where to mark Camp Jaha on the worn paper.

‘Where are all your children?’ she asks when the mapping is done. She has seen none since entering the camp. Every man or woman she has laid eyes on has been over thirty, haggard and cold in the eyes. There is no youth amidst these people. No life.

‘Away in the tents,’ Pike says in the same tone he did when he was her teacher. ‘They have lessons. Earth skills are more important than ever, now.’

It seems off, and Clarke frowns; purely teaching theory, ignoring the realm outside, does not seem practical. The world is happening around them now. Adapt or die.

‘I agree with the thought, but not the method,’ she tells him. ‘Wherever you landed, whatever happened to you there, you all need to know how to hunt.’

‘Look around, Clarke,’ Pike tells her haughtily. ‘We’re doing fine.’

She does. Their tents are clearly stolen, much like their clothes. The colours match the common wear of the Ice Nation, and Clarke wonders how they possibly managed to kill enough Azgeda to outfit every last body.

The answer, of course, is simple: they didn’t. There are only sixty-three of them left – how many died to get them this far? They make Clarke’s losses – the fifty-three juveniles that bear icy residence in her chest, now – look like _nothing_.

‘You’re all starving,’ Clarke states. ‘I can see it beneath your clothes. I can hunt for you, but one tracker will not be enough to feed sixty people.’

‘One will,’ Pike says, earning her frustrated gaze. He smiles at her, but he is hollow. ‘You just have to cut them up the right way.’

The pain in the back of her head is sudden and vicious, and the world goes black around her before she can ask what he means.

 

\--

 

The children are not in the tents – the food is.

Three grown men stripped of clothing and hogtied, faces bearing Azgeda marks, mouths bound with bloody cloth to keep them quiet – not that they’d be much for speaking if it were absent; Clarke is made to watch as Pike cuts out their tongues.

He leaves hers. He likes to ungag her when he comes in to check out his stock and talk her through the process, almost as though the tent has replaced the metal walls of his classroom and he is teaching her something good again. Clarke doesn’t give him the satisfaction of speaking back – mostly because, when he brings in a saw and cuts off both arms of one of the Azgeda men, slow and bloody, and sews it up roughly afterwards to stem the flow, she is biting her tongue to keep from adding bile to the blood pooling on the floor of her prison.

He brings her a bowl of stew later – plops it on the floor in front of her and smiles. It is the same smile he gave when she was nine and couldn’t figure out the difference between wild potato and sweet pea, encouraging her to work out the problem in her favour. He waits for twenty minutes before realising she will not eat his food – his sins, served in thick, bloody broth – before scowling and taking it back from her. He leaves her, bound and gagged with the Azgeda to await her turn for slaughter.

They _are_ the food, and Clarke is too.

 

\--

 

It strikes her again in the night: there are no children out there. Not one.

At least she knows what happened to them now.

 

\--

 

In the morning the tent comes down, and Clarke is herded through the forest with a blade at her back like the other livestock. The armless man staggers from his blood loss, but sheer willpower seems to keep him on his feet for the length of the trek. For all that Clarke has heard of his people, this one man earns all the respect she has left in herself to give.

Pike falls into step beside her sometime in the late morning.

‘You know, I admire your resilience, Clarke,’ he says conversationally, as though she did not watch him remove a man’s limb the day before, as though she doesn’t know what he’s made his diet in his time on the ground. ‘You were one of my best students, you know. I always knew that you would thrive down here.’

‘Would that I could say the same of you,’ she says around the stone that has been in her throat since the Azgeda first bloodied the ground, stoppering the vomit threatening to rise from her stomach.

‘We all do what we must to survive,’ Pike tells her sagely. ‘The grounders came to kill us all, unprovoked, so we killed them. Nothing grew in the Ice. Nothing lived. So we ate them.’

‘But not _just_ them, right Pike?’ Clarke counters stonily. ‘Tell me, who did you murder first: your children, or your elders?’

‘We did what we had to,’ Pike recites – his pillar of strength in hard times, the mantra to cleanse the sins from his soul. ‘The _animals_ kept coming, and we had to be strong for the next attack. It’s survival of the fittest, Clarke – and we were the fittest.’

‘The only animals here are you,’ Clarke says and spits at his feet.

His exhale is slow and angry, and she is sure that lesser men would shudder in their boots at the sight of it. But Clarke is no man – she is _Wanheda_ , mountain slayer, myth of the men she used to call monsters. She is a bedtime story - a nightmare - and there is no mortal, no matter how savage, fit to frighten her.

When they set up camp Pike makes her watch as he takes the armless man and relieves him of his legs, too. Then his head. They keep him alive for as much of the process as possible; Clarke does not imagine the pleasure she sees in the eyes of his butchers.

The mountain will haunt her for the rest of this life, but when she watches Pike’s men rip into the charred human flesh – crispy and blackened on the outside but still bloody enough inside to leave a trail down their chins – she knows that this vision will follow her well into the next one.

 

\--

 

A woman comes to her in the night. Her face is dirty and her cheeks are hollow and there is darkness in her eyes.

‘My name is Hannah. My son was on the dropship – Monty,’ she says, and the plea is evident in her voice. Clarke struggles with her answer; she can empathise with a mother fearing for her child - Monty’s mother – but she cannot bring herself to connect with woman standing in the tent, hands shaking in front of her.

‘I know him,’ Clarke says with just enough stress to imply he is still alive, and watches the woman smile, almost friendly. ‘He would be disgusted by you.’

The smile drops instantly. There is a knife at Hannah’s hip; she draws the blade slowly with shuddering hands to hold before Clarke’s face. Despite the obvious ill intent, when Clarke feels the steel nick at her brow and her own blood well up in the wound she knows that it is accidental.

‘We do what we must to survive,’ the manic farmer says, and Clarke straight up spits in her face.

‘Tell that to your son when he asks why your hands won’t stop shaking, you crazy bitch.’

Hannah laughs, and stops herself, and laughs again. She walks around Clarke, straight faced and cackling madly from somewhere in the back of her throat in spite of the expression. She kneels down behind the bound girl – and for all her bravado, her indignation, her courage, Clarke has never felt more fear than now, a knife at her back in the hands of the mother of her best friend.

Cold steel bites into her right hand but the pangs that answer it are white hot, racking all the way up her arm and into her chest. She sweats and bites at her tongue until she can taste her own blood; the flavour makes her dry heave. Hannah Green saws two fingers from her hand, laughing all the while. Afterwards she stands in front of Clarke again and makes the girl watch as she nibbles the raw flesh away and spits the bones back out on the ground, laughing and laughing and _laughing_.

Even the slick blood coating Clarke’s palms is not enough to make her bared, bloody knucklebones littering the tent floor seem real.

 

\--

 

The days after her fingers go seem to blur by.

Pike wraps her hand, pats her on the shoulder with a kind smile and says ‘Can’t let you go bad. We’ve still got two weeks to get to your camp.’

One of his men lurches into her tent one night with an expression of absolute rapture, and she worries what he will do.

‘Haven’t had woman in ages,’ he tells her and pulls out a dagger, ‘taste better, y’ow. Pike don’t think so; I know.’

He flays the skin of her outer forearm just beneath her elbow for a midnight snack, and she doesn’t know whether to be thankful or sick.

The second Azgeda warrior loses one arm the next day, then the other, then his legs, then his head. Hannah makes her sit by the fire and watch as they crack open his skull and scoop out his brain. They hold the pieces beneath her nose as though it should tantalise her and laugh when she lurches forward to vomit in reply.

They do that a lot: laugh. It’s sporadic, and empty, and it starts shudders in the depths of Clarke’s bones. Some of them shake – hands, arms, their whole bodies – and stumble through the forest when they walk, imbalanced. Their speech slurs when they talk around the campfire at night, but it doesn’t seem to bother any of them at all, almost as though it is in their language now to skate through words like they’re optional. Clarke wonders how advanced the _kuru_ is and how much the radiation mutated it over the years.

She hopes it kills them quickly.

 

\--

 

Pike’s man, the Flayer, comes back for a few more inches, obsessed with her complexion: her shoulder, her hip, her thigh. If she lives, it will be as patchwork. He consumes her skin before her as though it is a gift from the gods themselves, rapture in human flesh. Her disgust only makes the taste sweeter, it seems.

Her old teacher comes to clean up her wounds every morning after with a bright shining smile, and Clarke hates him more than she has ever hated anyone in her life.

 

\--

 

She wishes she were standing by the Mountain doors again; even Lexa’s lies seem like a kindness now.

 

\--

 

They are a week out from where the Ark fell and Clarke knows her time is up. There is one Azgeda left – he smells like shit, and piss, and the same rot of human blood that she does – but if Pike and his men have any sense left they will let him outlive her.

A dead Azgeda in their camp will explain away a lot easier than Clarke’s mutilated body, after all.

Pike walks ahead of her one day, talking in low tones with Hannah, but he keeps looking back her way, and she knows this will be it: this will be the day. Every glance piles another stone in her roiling, empty stomach. Her limbs are jelly, and her head aches, and she has not eaten more than a few berries in a whole two weeks now, but she does not stumble. Not for him, not for the monster he is now. She won’t give him the satisfaction.

 

\--

 

Salvation comes in the strangest ways. Clarke’s, for instance, grows on a perennial shrub on the exact path that Pike has chosen to follow to the fallen Ark.

 _Clarke’s_ salvation is a pile of jobi nuts and the sixty-three cannibals stupid enough to eat them.

 

\--

 

The Azgeda rolls to his knees as soon as the tent has been set up and they have been left in it alone. He shifts until he has his back to hers, and she feels his fingers scrabble for the ropes that tie her, trying his best to loosen the knot. He, apparently, also saw Pike’s men harvesting the plant for a snack and understood the opportunity it presents to them. The threat of Pike’s numbers – sick or not – have kept them trapped in this tent for all these weeks, but under the hallucinatory effect of the jobi nuts they will be no problem at all. Sixty three sick little lambs led to slaughter.

It takes more time than Clarke hopes it will, and her flayer returns before the Azgeda succeeds. He is not a sane man – _at all_ – so he does not move the two of them apart.

This time he doesn’t pull out his knife; he brings the saw.

‘Shame,’ he says. ‘Been nice eatin’ you. D’n worry. We’ll have fun.’

He crouches in front of her and brings the saw to her leg even as she squirms to get away from him, and Clarke begs – _“float me, fuck, jok, fuck everything, this can’t be it, this can’t be it for me, please, please, is this what I deserve?”_ \- for the knot to be undone, for her hands to be free. The handsaw bites through the cotton of her pants, rips through her skin, tears at flesh, and Clarke _screams_.

Her partner in captivity yanks at her ropes and they loosen but it is not enough, and Clarke pulls at them until her raw skin breaks and then pushes until her thumb presses awkwardly against the ground. The Flayer pulls at the saw in her flesh and laughs with the motion, and Clarke twists her hands behind her back, thrashes her body, pushes until the thumb _cracks_ and sends pain shooting up her hand as well.

Without the obstruction of set bone structure and with the help of a hard yank her right hand slips out of her bonds – middle two fingers gone, thumb broken, useless. Her left hand follows, and she uses it to smack the Flayer across the face and send him reeling.

Her breathing is fast, blood running fast from the adrenaline, and the rage takes over before she has sense to stop it. She pulls the saw from her leg; it’s teeth part from her flesh with a tiny squelching sound. The Flayer is pushing back to his feet, and she launches herself at him with an inhuman scream. He lands on his back staring up at her, and she sits astride his chest, brings the saw to his throat and _pulls_.

The Flayer gurgles as he dies, blood bubbling from his torn throat, and this – _revenge,_ sweet and bloody – this is true divinity. Pike and his men have never seen it.

Clarke releases the Azgeda as soon as she knows the Flayer is dead. The ropes are easier to handle with the knife that she takes from the Flayer’s bloody body, and after a short moment they both stand on shaking feet in the middle of their dank prison. His tongue is gone and he cannot speak, but he points at the blood pooling at the ground before he holds out a hand to her and she knows without words what he is asking for. She clasps his wrist with her mangled hand as a gesture of respect, and when he sneers she echoes it.

‘Jus drein jus daun,’ she says for him, hands him the bloody saw and keeps the knife for herself. ‘Kill the monsters.’

 

\--

 

With Pike and his men doped up and out of their minds it is almost easy. They bleed – _all of them_ – like the men and women and children that they bled before Clarke.

Clarke kills them all and every death relieves her, as though erasing their blight from the world will cure her own – even Monty’s mother, the woman who will ruin his eyes for her for the rest of her life. For a moment she wonders what rites they deserve for their deaths, but the answer is simple: none. Just like her. They are all monsters, just in different ways.

When it is done, and even Pike lies face up on the dirt staining his stolen furs red with blood - Clarke stabs and stabs and stabs until he chokes on steel and the metallic tang of his own life leaving his body, and then she stabs some more - the Azgeda man pauses as if to wait for orders. Clarke has none.

Her thigh aches from the deep gash - down to the muscle, maybe to the bone - and while she is _covered_ in blood most of what stains her pants is her own. She doesn’t know how it carried her this far. Two weeks without much food, with her own blood seeping out by the day, with limbs and skin wrenched from her bones – it is too much.

‘I am done, I think,’ she tells him. She doesn’t even know if he can understand her. ‘I can’t erase what I’ve done. I can’t fix it. But maybe this is enough. Maybe I can be done now.’

She sinks to her knees, and he stares at her and frowns.

‘I’m sure you have someone who loves you,’ she babbles, kneeling in the blood of her mentor. ‘You should go home. We all should.’

He points at her silently.

‘This is my home now,’ she says. ‘Fitting to die amidst my people. Monsters, just like me.’

It seems simple to her: she will lose the last of her blood and life will leave her, and perhaps for a moment – even surrounded by blood and death, tools of her trade – it may even be sweet. Her silent comrade hesitates for a long moment; he must agree because he turns from her to stumble into the trees alone. Free. Clarke counts the seconds as her blood runs out, wistful for whatever comes after.

When darkness finally takes her it doesn’t feel at all like coming home.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes with an IV in her arm and no clue of how it got there. The walls are concrete, decorated with wrought iron and rich drapery. Muted sunlight breaches her room through the sheer curtains bordering a whole side of the room. Clarke has no idea where she is and the dread that comes with that knowledge is very much familiar.

(It can’t be worse than last time.)

The click of a latch draws her attention and the door on her right wall swings open quietly. A familiar figure slips through with a tray in her calloused hands (Clarke knows they’re calloused from when they cupped her face and pulled her in for a kiss before the Mountain; the memory doesn’t hurt like it used to). She is stately but dressed down - well fitting cotton clothes and none of the armour that normally goes over them - and when she notices Clarke’s gaze she halts completely.

‘I had hoped you would wake, Clarke,’ Lexa says cautiously and seems to hazard a smile. ‘It’s been days.’

Clarke knows that some part of her should be furious, should be spitting and screaming with rage, should be indignant and hurt and volatile - but then, she should also probably be dead. The words that she chooses surprise her, but then given her history they’re absolutely true - and so is the incredulous smile that accompanies them.

‘You have no idea how glad I am to see you.’

 

\--

 

There’s an inevitable fact about a wound sustained from a cannibal cutting into your leg with an old, grimy saw: it’s going to get infected.

Clarke ends up in bed for days, in and out of consciousness. Lexa’s healers drug her to clean her wounds because she won’t let them touch her otherwise - the first who tries to dig his tools into her leg ends up with the crude scalpel lodged firmly in his own palm (he's lucky she didn't go for the throat). The sedative is more for their sake than hers. 

Her patchwork skin is coming along just fine and the odd stumps where her fingers used to be look to be healing nicely every time they’re unwrapped, but the leg is a problem. The Flayer sawed well into the muscle before she’d managed to get free, and the Trigedakru may have some IV bags and some light antibiotics on hand - traded from _Arkadia_ , she’s pretty sure - but they aren’t exactly up to surgical level procedures in clean rooms. 

That saw was coated in dirt and gristle from the men it cut before her, and sometimes when they wait too long to tip the _natwada_ down her throat and the drug starts to wear off Clarke swears she can still feel those tiny little pieces of them in the wound spewing rot and venom into her veins. 

They feed her, but when the sepsis has been dealt with and the infected flesh has been cut and cleaned entirely from the wound, after the sedatives wear off for good, the only thing she particularly remembers about her meals is throwing them back up. 

Lexa comes to visit when Clarke is coherent again. She arrives with a cautious knock at the door and a bowl of steaming broth in her hands, and Clarke watches with tired eyes as she crosses the room.

‘I've brought you food,’ the Commander says as though it isn’t obvious. She passes Clarke the bowl and stands awkwardly at her bedside. ‘Vegetable soup. Nothing too heavy to start with. I’m told you didn’t take too well to eating while they were handling your leg.’

‘Starvation and septic shock will do that to a person,’ Clarke mumbles, toying with her spoon and taking a cautious sip of the broth. It is fairly muted in flavour but not unpleasant - and that’s perfect, really, because she’s pretty sure that anything stronger would have her retching in an instant. She loads up the spoon with some of the diced vegetables floating in her bowl and tries warily to swallow them down. Lexa shifts silently on her feet beside the bed, and Clarke only waits a moment to be sure her stomach is mostly settled before saying: ‘Sit down. Your loitering is making me anxious.’

Lexa sits on the edge of her mattress as directed rather abruptly. Clarke manages to consume two more spoonfuls of soup, achingly slowly, before the Commander gathers her wits well enough to speak.

‘I am glad you recovered,’ she says. ‘There were some days there where I was worried that they would not be able to cut the infection out and you would lose your leg to it. Or your life.’ When Clarke only grunts around the food in her mouth in reply, Lexa hazards: ‘My healers tell me you will not allow them to change your dressings.’

‘True.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘I don’t know them,’ Clarke says simply. ‘I don’t know who they are or what they want aside from the fact that they are your people.’

‘And you don’t trust me?’

‘I trust you to put your people first, sideline your emotional interests, and consider my wellbeing for as long as the option is available to you,’ Clarke explains. ‘I know you very well, Lexa. But I don’t know _them_. I don’t trust _them_. I don’t want their hands near me in any capacity, even with your endorsement, and I need you to accept that.’

‘Because they’re _grounders_?’ Lexa asks, distaste evident in her tone.

Clarke shakes her head and reaches out to set her bowl on the bedside table. When she tries to push herself up further against the headboard her arms shake and her leg throbs three times worse than usual. Lexa reaches out to grip her shoulders with an intention to help, and Clarke flinches when they make contact. The soup in her belly roils.

‘Because they’re _people_ ,’ Clarke says. ‘They’re people I don’t know, and I can’t even trust most of the people I _do_.’

Sadness pervades Lexa’s expression, and Clarke knows without asking that she is taking the words personally - and perhaps she should, though it was not Clarke’s intention. The reference was to Pike; to the people who came down from the sky she grew up in and then grew so far apart from her that they were unrecognisable. Clarke’s distrust is born of monsters, not politicians.

‘Your dressings must be changed,’ Lexa tells her stiffly, ‘or you will undo all the work that my healers have done to fix you.’

‘Then change them for me now.’

 _‘Me?’_ Lexa sounds almost scandalised by the suggestion.

‘There’s no one else in this city I trust with it,’ Clarke says - and she means it. Lexa left her alone at the Mountain door and will never apologise for it, but her motivation was reasonable - Clarke _understands_. There are other things that people do that she does not: create drugs that make monsters of men, turn children into blood bags, make meals of their friends.

Lexa has slighted her in the past but it has never been for greed. It has never come at the cost of Clarke’s body.

And perhaps the Commander knows that - perhaps on some level she understands the source of Clarke’s distress - because after a long, thoughtful moment the heda locks eyes with her and says: 

‘Okay.’

 

\--

 

The Commander returns to Clarke’s room with a tray carrying a bowl of warm water, a cloth, a pair of scissors, some sort of poultice in a clay pot and a pile of fresh gauze.

‘You've been in fever for a while. I thought you might feel better with a dry bath,’ Lexa says to explain the water, avoiding Clarke’s gaze as she sets her things down on the side table. Everything about her seems painfully awkward. ‘I feel I must remind you, Clarke, that you have wounds in places that may require…’

‘My clothes off,’ Clarke dryly supplies and watches the tips of the heda’s ears flush bright red between her braids. 

‘Yes,’ Lexa confirms, tone tight and uncomfortable. ‘If this bothers you I can fetch a healer and -’

The sentence chokes to a halt when Clarke tugs at the bottom of the cotton shirt they supplied her with in the midst of her sickness and pulls it over her head. For a long, frightening moment, Clarke worries that she will turn to the Commander and find her staring, enraptured and ravenous. She takes a deep breath to work up the courage and when she looks Lexa is staring at her - but it is not with an expression of greed or desire: it is with pain.

‘Oh, Clarke.’

Beneath her shirt Clarke is a mess of gauze pads. There are four patches on her front and her arms alone, and she knows that there are at least two on her back. She remembers receiving the wounds quite distinctly: the Flayer’s laughter in her ears, his breath on her neck, and his knife against her skin peeling it off of her.

She swallows thickly and pushes on, shoving the blanket off of her legs and exposing the skin of one thigh and the thick, dirtying bandages encasing the other. Then she is clad only in the spartan chest bindings and breeches that the healers put her into when she was well sedated and the patches covering the wounds that should have killed her.

‘Are you sure?’ Lexa asks - one last offer to take it back and ask a stranger to see her at her most vulnerable. Clarke grumbles and pushes herself forward to sit in the middle of the bed.

‘Do the back first,’ she says gruffly, because she knows it will be the hardest part. Lexa climbs up behind her, and the mattress bounces slightly as she settles.

‘I am going to remove the bandages now,’ Lexa tells her quietly, readying her for the contact. She still flinches when warm fingers brush against her skin, pull at the sticky corners of the gauze pads and peel them from her skin. The damp cloth is warm when Lexa presses it to her, but she still scowls and clenches her fists when it brushes at the nape of her neck.

Even with their familiarity, even with the request for the permission and the gentleness of Lexa’s touch, even when she is prepared for it, Clarke spends _every second_  that Lexa drags the cloth across her back feeling her skin _crawl_. She thinks for a moment that it will shudder and slide from her flesh and pile on the ground, primed for the Flayer’s hungry lips - and then she remembers that she ripped a saw through his neck until she could hear the whistle of the air in his throat; that he is dead and can not take another inch of her. 

The movement of the cloth across the length of Clarke’s back slows - seems, for a moment, more deliberate and even gentler than it has been thus far - and she knows that Lexa has noticed her trembling.

‘How did I end up in Polis?’ Clarke asks tightly, because with her illness and her fever it hasn’t occurred to her before now - and honestly, she needs anything to focus on that isn’t the feeling of human touch. _Anything_.

‘A man brought you,’ Lexa says warily. ‘Ice Nation. You were slung over the back of his saddle when he rode to the gates. One of the guards recognised you as Wanheda and brought you inside. I will apply the poultice now.’

‘Azgeda?’ Clarke asks, glad for the warning as Lexa’s fingers traverse her wounds, spreading cold, thick cream across her aching skin. ‘He came back for me?’

‘I do not know,’ Lexa says. ‘He will not tell me anything. I have been holding him in a room upstairs.’

‘He _can’t_ tell you anything,’ Clarke tells her. ‘They cut his tongue out the first day that I was there.’

‘He is not the one who did this to you?’ the Commander asks quietly. Clarke does not need to see her face to know that she is surprised - does not need to ask to know that in this instance perhaps Lexa's bias has the floor. There is bad blood between the Commander and the Azkwin, and it leeches into her regard for Azgeda as a whole.

‘No.’

There is a short moment of silence, almost as though Lexa is expecting her to continue; to clarify who took the skin from her bones if not the Azgeda. When nothing is said she sighs and says, ‘I suppose I should release him.’

‘I would recommend it,’ Clarke mumbles. ‘Are you done?’

‘I’m on the last patch,’ Lexa says gently. Clarke does not feel her fingers pause - doesn’t feel them at all - but when the Commander queries ‘This one is larger than the rest, and deeper,’ Clarke knows that they have. She swallows thickly and feels Lexa’s slow exhale behind her more than she hears it. ‘Tell me when you feel my fingers.’

Long seconds pass without sensation before Clarke grunts and flinches at the ghost of a touch on her left hip. She shivers when Lexa traces around the dead zone with a calloused pointer.

‘How much?’ the blonde croaks out, throat tight.

‘Two inches across, a little less in height,’ Lexa says, and then: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why?’ Clarke asks, lifting her bandaged right hand where she’s sure the Commander can see it over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure you’ve noticed already, but sensory nerve damage is hardly the worst of my injuries.’

‘Loss is loss, no matter how large,’ Lexa mutters before she covers the wounds back over and pushes off of the mattress to stand at Clarke’s side once again. ‘Move back. I must do the rest now.’

It is easier to handle when she has her back pressed to the headboard and Lexa sitting firmly within her field of vision. For all the skin that she has bared - pale and sick and proof of how weak she is - as long as Lexa sits in front of her Clarke does not feel vulnerable. Lexa hands the cloth to her so that she can wipe the dried sweat from her skin, and sets to work unwrapping the bandages around Clarke’s leg. 

The wound is grotesque even after surgery: long and ropy, left lumped and misshapen from all the dead flesh cut out underneath and held closed with thick, black thread. The quads, she knows, are fucked - completely. Lexa says nothing, but Clarke can easily see the way the Commander clenches her fists and scowls, shoulders taught, glistening irises hiding behind blinking eyelids. Clarke feels all of the tension drain out of her own chest.

‘Well. Footraces are out of the question, I suppose,’ she states, because it is easier to fall back on medical knowledge and poor humour than it is to dwell on her losses now: two fingers, her senses, her perfect gait.

‘You _will_ walk on your own again,’ Lexa says, almost an order if not for the pained glint in her gaze. 

‘Not for a while,’ Clarke tells her gently - as though this sentence is Lexa’s to bear rather than her own. Apparently only one of them is particularly bothered by it now. ‘Muscle can grow back, but not enough to repair damage like this. I may walk, but there will be limits.’

Lexa locks her jaw stubbornly and returns to her duty cleaning the wound, but does not argue. There is silence until after Clarke has finished with the cloth and dropped it back in the bowl on her bedside table.

‘The healers fed you tea while you were unconscious,’ Lexa says slowly after she has wiped at the wound with some kind of alcohol to clean it and started to wrap it with clean bandages. ‘The kind our women take when they are not ready to - start families. With the state you were in - they didn’t know if you’d been -’

She hesitates, avoiding Clarke’s gaze, and it is enough to infer the meaning.

‘Thoughtful,’ the blonde says slowly, ‘but unnecessary. _That_ didn’t happen.’

Lexa seems to sink back on her haunches with half the tension easing from her body; her relief is almost tangible. But her cautious tone returns when she asks: ‘Then what did?’

They stare at each other for a long time - Lexa questioning, gentle in every way, open and asking to be trusted, and Clarke - 

Clarke can’t.

She ducks her head and drops her gaze to her bandaged hand, focusses on pulling at the gauze until it falls off entirely and exposes her aching, mangled fingers: the broken thumb slowly healing, the stitched up nubs of her missing fingers. The sedative is gone from her system, but she is still tired right down to her bones, and she can’t talk about it: not about Pike, who became a stranger right before her eyes; Hannah, who bloodied her teeth and left Clarke’s knucklebones lying in the dirt like refuse; the Flayer; the two Azgeda who didn’t make it this far; her own fear, and the lack of it.

She cannot tell Lexa what she did when the ropes were gone.

‘Tell me who they are and I will handle them,’ Lexa coaxes when no explanation comes. Clarke swallows thickly, understanding: it is the Commander offering vengeance without asking for reason; it is Lexa’s heart outrunning her head. 

‘You can’t,’ Clarke chokes out. ‘There is nothing left of them to handle.’

 

\--

 

She dreams about fire and blood, and the way the Flayer rasped when she tore his throat out.

 

\--

 

A guard comes to her room as the sun sets outside. He wanders around her room, setting flame to a dozen candles in order to lighten the space, and then takes up post near the door. He is silent, and the longer that he is there the tenser Clarke feels. After long minutes of silence the door opens again and another man steps in - but this one she recognises.

It’s the Azgeda who set her free. 

He has a stack of parchment and a stick of charcoal in his hand, and he pulls a chair over from the table at the other side of the room to sit at her bedside with what she imagines to be a smile - it’s as close as either of them can get.

Lexa may have had the man locked up, but she clearly hasn’t done so cruelly - he is free of dirt, black hair shorn down to an inch or so from his scalp, cleanly dressed and altogether healthy. Clarke watches quietly as he scrawls slow, deliberate lines across the paper in his lap and then raises the sheet for her to see.

 _N-Y-L-E_.

‘That’s your name? Nyle?’ Clarke asks and receives a pleased nod in return. ‘Why have you stayed?’

 _N-O. H-O-M-E,_ he writes. The letters are shaky like a child’s, and she knows that while he took the time to learn he has not had much use for writing in his life. _S-K-Y. M-E-N. F-E-A-S-T._

The words make her stomach roil.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tells him quietly, and he seems to stew over her condolences for a long moment before he shrugs. Clarke grits her teeth and says nothing more because she understands - it is sad, horrible, but it is also _done_. Nothing can be changed. Nyle scribbles on his paper and passes her the shaky scrawl.

_S-E-R-V-E. W-A-N-H-E-D-A._

‘Why?’ Clarke asks with a frown, and he grumbles in the back of his throat and squints at her with ice blue eyes as though that alone should be an answer.

_C-O-R-D-E-S. S-A-N-G._

It is some vague, broken version of French, she thinks - and while Clarke has hazy memories of her grandfather teaching her about it so she would know when he swore at the dinner table she is not sure that she knows well enough to guess at more than “blood cord”.

‘Your queen will not take it well,’ she mumbles instead, but Nyle shakes his head and returns his charcoal to the paper emphatically.

 _A-Z-K-W-I-N. G-A-V-E. N-O. J-U-S-T-I-C-E,_ he writes. _W-A-N-H-E-D-A. D-I-D._

And for a moment, with his blue eyes staring assurances at her from beneath his furrowed brow, Clarke can almost believe that is what she did.

 

\--

 

When Lexa comes to change her dressings again paper scraps litter the floor for metres from the bed and Nyle’s hulking figure is seated cross-legged opposite Clarke on the mattress. The guard has long since left, knowing Nyle means no harm, and now they are playing games with knucklebones.

 _Clarke’s_ knucklebones. Lexa doesn’t know that.

She hesitates at the doorway with the tray in her hand and seems to consider turning to leave; Clarke waves her over with her good hand and picks up one of the white shards from the fur over her legs. 

‘Check it out,’ she says with morbid humour. ‘This is what the rest of my fingers look like beneath the flesh.’

The Commander purses her lips and moves to drop her tray at the side table and Clarke pretends not to notice the slight paling of her skin. 

‘These are yours?’ the Commander asks tightly and Clarke hums, rolling the bone between her fingers and searching out the marks that Hannah’s greedy teeth left behind.

‘Nyle collected them after I passed out that night,’ she explains absently. ‘They were in his pocket for two weeks. Would have been a pain to sleep on.’

‘Why?’ Lexa asks, ignoring the silent man sitting at attention at the end of Clarke’s bed. The injured girl scrabbles through the pile of dirtied paper at her side, settles on a scrap and holds it out for the Commander to take. 

_T-O. R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R. W-H-A-T. W-E. L-O-S-T._

‘I’m going to wear them in a pouch around my neck and throw them at anyone who wants to talk up their war wounds,’ she declares dryly. 

Lexa stares at her cautiously and asks, ‘Are you well, Clarke?’

‘I’m holding my own finger bones,’ the blonde says. ‘This is about as good as it’s gonna get.’

Lexa sighs and accepts it.

 

\--

 

Lexa orders Nyle to leave the room while she changes Clarke’s bandages. Clarke nods for him to go because she doesn’t quite know how to explain: Nyle has seen her scream, has seen her cry, has seen her covered in blood and shit, her own waste and the gore she tore from other bodies, and compared to all of that that her nakedness seems like nothing. 

 

\--

 

In her dreams, Cage drills into her hip to reach her marrow. It hurts, and instead of sending the vials out of the room for his people to use he funnels them into his own mouth, laughing and laughing and _laughing_ …

When she wakes Nyle is lying on the floor at her bedside, watching her with tired eyes. After a while he starts to hum - a deep, warm sound that slides gently through the room - and lulls her back to sleep, finally dreamless.


	3. Chapter 3

Lexa insists that Clarke cannot remove the stitches from her flesh until one of her healers approves the process, so Clarke has Nyle bring her a knife and pulls them out herself.

The stubs of her missing fingers ache when she tries to move them - pocked with stitch holes and almost squared from how the skin has been pulled back together. She can see the knuckles flex when she tries to curl her fingers, and everything about the motion seems normal except for the missing length of the digits above them. She wiggles the mottled stumps and watches the way the muscles pull across the back of her hand, wondering if the absence will ever feel normal to her.

The thread in her leg is easier to cut but takes much longer to remove. The saw that caused the wound may have cut through in a straight line, but the infection that came after has warped it. The scar is ropy and knotted, jagged across the face of her thigh until it’s midpoint where it forks and splits off: an inch and a half down toward her knee, three inches across and northward to her inner thigh. The flesh is cragged and lumpy - cratered by missing muscle, absent of the sick tissue that had to be taken out - red with mottled purple bruising interspersed, marked with the criss-cross indentation that the sutures leave behind.

It is almost cathartic to look at; to know that, finally, her skin is as ugly as her mind.

When she swings her legs to the edge of the mattress and lowers her feet to the floor, cautious of the way her newly knitted skin stretches with the motion, Nyle stands from his chair and walks to the bedside. He doesn’t reach for her until after she has tried to stand and failed of her own accord - and even then he waits for Clarke to raise an arm in askance before he tries. When his arm slips around her waist to help lift her it is firm and respectful, but not gentle: like stone, fur-wrapped, rather than human skin.

He helps her to walk to the door, opens it for her and supports her weight while she asks the guard outside for directions to the washrooms and an attendant to meet her there. She may have her feet on the ground, but her body aches and her muscles are reluctant to respond after so many days in bed, and Nyle practically carries her all the way to the baths. He takes his time, allowing her at least the illusion of being able to carry her own weight though she is exhausted even by the bare minimum of movement in only minutes.

The room they end up in is a structured mess of concrete and mosaic tiles, with a huge paved pit in the centre steaming with water. There is a bench along one wall, clear except for a pile of folded towels and a set of simple clothing. Whichever of Lexa’s attendants set these things out for her apparently did so and left in the ten minutes it took for Nyle to coax her down the hall. 

Nyle sits her on the bench and steps back to the wall, content to wait until she calls for him again. Clarke has barely pulled her shirt over her head when the door bursts open.

‘Out,’ the Commander orders, eyes dark and locked on Nyle’s idle form. The tall man glances to Clarke for approval and complies when she gives him a small nod. 

The latch clicks when the door closes behind him, and Lexa stands silent and fuming while Clarke proceeds to slowly unwrap her chest bindings.

‘You are still healing, Clarke,’ the brunette says after a long moment, stiff tone belying her anger. ‘You are not well enough to be about, and soaking your wounds will only do them disservice.’

‘Then I won’t _soak_ ,’ Clarke grumbles. The Commander huffs, unimpressed. ‘You can help me get this done or I can call Nyle in to do it instead, but either way I _will_  bathe today. I’m tired of feeling unclean.’

Lexa scowls her dissatisfaction but complies. She helps Clarke to stand again, arm wooden around the girl’s bare back, and averts her gaze respectfully from the most of her body. When Clarke has been sufficiently lowered into the water and found herself a seat on the small ledge beneath the surface (presumably built for exactly this purpose), the Commander treks around the bath to a small table in the back corner of the room and returns from it with two small wooden pots. She lowers herself to sit cross-legged on the tile at the edge of the bath and holds one of the pots out. 

‘For your skin,’ she says gruffly and stares at her own lap until long after Clarke takes it.

Removing the lid, Clarke finds a paste seemingly made from some kind of crushed grain and an oil with a muted floral scent. She scoops it onto curious fingers and rubs it into the skin of her arm. The grain scratches all the dried sweat from her skin - the blood and dirt she can not see anymore but feels ever so keenly every time she wakes from a nightmare - and the oil soothes and softens it after the fact, and Clarke lifts herself awkwardly out of the water and hastens to apply the scrub to every part of herself that she can reach.

She holds her breath and drops back into the water, sinks until it covers her from head to toe, and rubs the soap away. It leaves her feeling fresh, and clean, and bereft of the weight that all those weeks of travel and being unwell had left on the surface of her body. 

When she emerges again, drawing gasping breaths into weak lungs and wiping errant streams of water from her eyes, Lexa has given up on counting the threads of her trousers. The Commander stares, dark-eyed and frowning, and Clarke wades across the pool to rest on the ledge directly before her.

‘The other?’ she asks, glancing at the second pot but making no move to reach for it. Lexa looks down at her with troubled eyes and shifts it forward, out of her lap and on to the tile.

‘Hair,’ is all the explanation she gives.

‘Do it for me,’ Clarke orders, or asks - honestly, it’s somewhere in between. 

Lexa lets out a low, mangled sound somewhere between a squeak and a groan, but Clarke lifts her right hand and wiggles the pale stubs of her missing fingers as though it is anywhere near sufficient explanation. The Commander shifts to remove her boots and roll up the cuffs of her pants before shuffling forward to drop her legs in the water and Clarke moves to float between her knees, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from bare skin but not quite touching. She watches keenly as Lexa opens the pot and covers her fingers in the cream it holds. She waits for a moment, as long as it takes for it to become clear that for this Clarke will not turn her back, and then she reaches out cautious hands towards Clarke’s damp hair.

The icy feeling is immediate, racing rampant down Clarke’s spine at the barest touch of Lexa’s fingertips. The warrior is gentle - achingly so - but Clarke cannot help the way she cringes and reaches forward to twist the fingers of her good hand into the fabric of Lexa’s shirt.

‘I can stop,’ Lexa offers quietly, pausing in her ministrations. Clarke shakes her head - negative - and Lexa doesn’t ask again.

The truth of it is that human touch is hard to stomach, but Clarke _needs_ it - and her time alone in the woods was proof enough of that. She trusts Lexa not to cause her harm, but her body has yet to reflect that.

By the time Lexa mumbles for her to move back and rinse Clarke has her face pressed harshly into the fabric of Lexa’s trousers, muffling her ragged breathing in the cotton weave. Her shoulders are aching, muscles tense and tight across her back, and she cannot bring herself to move. Lexa sighs and slides further forward, reaching down to cup the water in her hands and lifts it to pour over blonde hair. 

Perhaps the third time she does this Clarke is jerked back into motion by the spidering trickle of water down the back of her skull. She lurches backwards into the pool, away from Lexa’s warmth; her hand is still caught in twisted cotton and she yanks the heda forward by her shirt, off of the tile and into the water with a short yelp. They both emerge from the water gasping.

‘Clarke,’ Lexa calls as though to scold her, but when her eyes find the panicking blonde the guilt is already apparent. She sighs, and Clarke watches the Commander bury her frustration beneath the seemingly endless well of patience she does her best to exude. It’s almost comical with her braids wet and sticking to her skull, droplets falling from her lashes. ‘This is not how I thought my day would go.’

‘You mean you _don’t_ normally end your days in a bath with a naked woman? Shame,’ Clarke teases, but her voice is tight in the wake of her panic and the joke falls flat. 

‘At least you’ve rinsed your hair,’ Lexa replies - an easy sidestep - and then gestures for her to exit. 

Getting out of the bath is harder than getting in - and that’s saying something, because with her weak muscles and her mutilated thigh getting anywhere _is_ a trial. Lexa supports her weight with gentle fingers and wooden hands, and releases her as soon as she is in place to take a seat again on the bench at the side of the room. She offers the blonde a towel and turns away to provide some modicum of privacy while she dries herself.

Dressing becomes a whole other matter entirely: the chest bindings are finicky though not necessarily difficult, but weak and imbalanced as she is in every way the breeches are a pain to pull on. She succeeds after a fashion - hoisting herself off of the bench with one shaking arm and balancing precariously with her one good foot while she uses her left hand to pull the cotton up - but is left exhausted and wheezing from the effort. After Lexa has towelled herself off to an acceptable level Clarke asks for help with the rest. The Commander complies, but insists on checking over each of her wounds before she covers them. 

‘Lexa,’ Clarke hazards after the woman has helped to pull the light pants comfortably up to her waist with careful fingers. ‘This is not how I thought my _life_ would go.’

Lexa kneels with a hand pressing loosely at the wooden bench on either side of Clarke, and though she is sure she would if it were anyone else Clarke for once does not feel trapped. The Commander looks up to her with dark eyes and a sad frown and says:

‘Life rarely goes how we think it will, I’m afraid. But sometimes it isn’t so terrible.’

Clarke hums and reaches up with her mangled right hand to wipe an errant drop of water from Lexa’s brow, and maybe when the seeking hands are her own the contact doesn’t always have to make her flinch.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it isn’t.’

 

\--

 

Nyle brings parchment and charcoal for drawing, thick books of aged paper filled with tales from before the fallout for reading, a deck of cards with hand drawn pictures on their faces to teach her games she doesn’t know how to play. These things satisfy her for a time - distract her tired mind while she funnels bland food into her weak body to replace the weight she’s lost - but confinement, like always, gets boring.

Clarke wants to walk, to see Polis and all the things it has to offer, to see other people and convince herself they are not all like her. This is difficult: the days have taught her to stand from the bed unassisted, but she cannot walk alone and even with Nyle at her side to take her weight she is made breathless before the end of the hall. Her body is heavy, and her muscles ache after minutes of standing as though they have forgotten how to hold her upright, and sometimes when she wakes in the morning and sees it on the table set across the room the thought of the mere metres she will have to cross to reach it makes her chest tight and her throat burn for want of tears.

She practices pacing the length of her room until frustration turns her muscles to fluid and Nyle’s touch has her crawling out of her own skin. Then they sit on the bed facing each other while he makes sounds in the back of his throat and the press of his teeth to his lips that almost sound like words - or like they could be words one day, when he learns to put them together with any force or fluency.

Lexa walks in during one of these sessions with bread for lunch, and Nyle falls abruptly silent before writing Clarke a note of farewell and excusing himself from the room.

‘Nyle did not have to go,’ the Commander mutters after the door has closed behind him and it is too late for the words to have effect. ‘I would say if I expected him to.’

‘He’s embarrassed,’ Clarke tells her. ‘It’s one thing to show your weakness in front of someone who already knows it; it’s another thing entirely to display it in front of the Commander of the Twelve Clans.’

‘Wounds sustained at the hands of others are not a weakness, and should not be treated so,’ Lexa grumbles.

‘It’s not the wound that shames him,’ the blonde says with a hard stare at her own clothed thigh. ‘It’s the recovery from it; the therapy required to move past it. It is the ability lost alongside the part. It’s sounding like a child when he is a man.’

‘Walking like a child when you are a woman?’ The words are soft, and Clarke’s indignation is curbed by the caring tone and the slight bounce of the mattress beneath her when Lexa lowers herself to sit on the edge. ‘Is this why he remains in Polis? Your understanding? Your recovery?’

Clarke shrugs.

‘He stays for “cordes sang” - whatever that means.’

For a long, contemplative moment Lexa is silent. 

‘It is an Azgeda tradition. The “Blood Tie”. A comradeship transcending love, loyalty, and death. I have not heard of it being undertaken even once in my lifetime,’ she explains, and her tone is somewhere between fascinated and troubled. ‘The Azkwin, Nia, would not enjoy the thought: one of her own pledging fealty to someone outside of herself in such an unbreakable way.’

‘It’s just one person,’ Clarke mumbles.

‘Indicative of a trend,’ the Commander says with a small smile. ‘You inspire loyalty wherever you turn, it seems. Nyle must value you very highly to make such an oath, Clarke.’

‘He’s seen me at my worst,’ Clarke says and thinks of blood, waste and fear; feral rage, and spit, and laughter, and steel in her hands stained red with life and death. ‘There is little I could do to disappoint him now. It’s kind of refreshing.’

‘How so?’

These images come to Clarke when she is sleeping on the rare nights she does not dream of sawed off limbs and skulls cracking open for greedy hands: Raven staring like she is a stranger, as though they ever even knew each other at all, _“you’re the only murderer here”_ ; Octavia glaring, shouting, scornful, _“it’s not good enough”,_ all judgement and indignation and never a lick of faith; her mother in the wake of the missile, _“you’ve crossed a line; their blood is on your hands”_ , and so achingly sympathetic in the Mountain, _“maybe there are no good guys”_ , meant to comfort and only managing to condemn. 

Clarke snorts dryly, and can’t stop there.

Jasper cradling death in his hands and laying the blame on her, _“what did you do?”_ , like it never could have been avoided, like his distrust never factored in to anything at all; Bellamy standing at the gates, sadness in his eyes, shoulders hunched like he carries even half as much as she does on them, _“please come inside”_ so that she can take it from him and bear the weight alone; Pike, fur clad and grinning, placing a bowl in front of her and saying  _“eat up, Clarke, be strong. Survive. You were always one of my best students, you know.”_

‘I disappoint everyone, Lexa,’ she says. ‘Even monsters.’

 

\--

 

She dreams that Hannah is standing above her, her son at her side. They smile at one another, adoring. Monty tells a joke in fractured English that Clarke doesn’t understand and mother and son laugh together while she rests on her knees.

There is a shooting pain in her skull, and her vision goes through every colour of the spectrum. Hannah looks to her, reaches out with bloody hands and waves chunks of grey flesh before Clarke’s eyes - brains, human brains, just like the Azgeda by the fireside. Hannah takes them back, hands them to her son to pop in his mouth, and reaches back for Clarke - for the top of her skull, bared and broken, the source of her screaming agony, their fresh food. 

Monty eats, and Hannah laughs, and Clarke screams and screams and screams herself back into consciousness.

Nyle sits on the floor at her bedside and hums until she calms, and in the dark Clarke can pretend that neither of them are crying.

 

\--

 

One morning while Clarke is reading and Nyle is busy sketching and pressing his teeth to his lip in the effort to make a “t” sound - or, Clarke thinks that’s his intention - the hulking Azgeda man slides a piece of paper to her across the mattress. While the practice is not unusual - this is how they communicate when their wordless coexistence just doesn’t fit the bill - the content of the paper is. It is a crude drawing of a one-legged man with sticks beneath his arms, and Clarke stares as though she’s never seen the practice before.

Crutches.

‘You mean to tell me that you _don’t_ enjoy carrying me to the bathroom twelve times a day?’ she asks with some vague attempt at levity, and Nyle - quite appropriately - rolls his eyes.

Her stoic companion leaves before lunch and returns in the mid-afternoon with a pair of rusting metal axilla crutches wrapped in worn leather, salvaged from the old world long ago and well-used since. When she asks how he got them, Nyle scribbles ‘F-A-V-O-R’ on a scrap of paper and leaves her to wonder whether that means he called one in or owes one now.

 

\--

 

The first hours are awkward and Clarke's arms ache for days. She learns to motor through the hallways within the week and pretends it doesn’t exhaust her to the bone. She employs Lexa’s company and takes the pulley systems to the base of Polis tower, forcing the Commander to take her on a tour of the city gardens. Nyle follows everywhere they go, awfully pleased with himself, and Lexa scowls and mutters glumly about how Clarke is “still weak” and “pushing herself too hard” and that she should be “resting”, but complies to every whim and reroute until the sun is going down.

Clarke lets her grumble and pretends not to see when the Heda clasps hands with Nyle in thanks as they part ways for the evening.

 

\--

 

Her diet has consisted of these things: soup, vegetables, bread, berries, fruits, grains. Lexa frequently brings her bowls piled with squares of some kind of grain and nut mix held together by something that sticks to Clarke’s fingers and is sweet on her tongue - she calls it “honey” and smiles that puzzled smile that means Clarke should _know_ this already (would, were she born on the ground).

Her diet has not entertained any of these: meat, oil, alcohol - but Lexa thinks perhaps they are ready to introduce them. 

They are sitting down for dinner - out of Clarke’s room, now, in a dining room that Clarke is all too keen to hop to unassisted. Nyle sits with them, alongside a handful of Lexa’s counsellors that Clarke is now getting to know. Lexa’s staff set the table and bring them plates piled with vegetables, gravy and spiced boar - freshly caught and bought from the city markets.

The Commander and her counsel feast with fervour, and Nyle - seated dutifully at Clarke’s side, using his fingers to push the food around in his mouth - eats slowly and with purpose and doesn’t touch the meat on his plate. Clarke notes this, but doesn’t know why - until she takes her knife and tries to cut into it, watches it slice and mould around the blade and spew grease onto the plate. The inside is cooked well enough for eating - pink, just a tiny hint of blood in the depths of the flesh - and it makes Clarke’s chest tight. Across the table Lexa glances to her and smiles with a hint of expectation, and Clarke forces herself to take a bite. 

It is soft in her mouth, stringy, elastic, warm and damp and full of flavour; Clarke gags quietly, covers her mouth and forces herself to swallow. She feels it like a stone in her throat and then her chest, all the way down to her stomach. She feels hot, and cold, and her mangled hand shakes until she drops her fork to the plate with a loud clatter. Silence falls around the table, and Clarke stares at the stumps between her shaking fingers and feels her stomach roil.

‘Nyle,’ she mumbles, and is thankful as ever for his perceptiveness when he stands immediately and drags her chair out far enough to hook an arm beneath her knees and lift her out of her seat.

Her whole body shudders in his grip, skin aflame and damp with sweat, and she cannot remember anything of the walk aside from the struggle to swallow back the bile. He places her down on flat concrete and disappears for a short moment before he shoves a metal bucket in her hands.

The letdown is immediate, and grotesque, and Nyle sits beside her silently while she heaves every morsel of the last day out of her stomach and into the rusting tin. By the time Lexa appears in the doorway of the room with Clarke’s abandoned crutches in hand the blonde is dry heaving, throat stinging from the expelled stomach acid and eyes watering from the effort.

‘What happened?’ the Commander asks, and Clarke shrugs and clutches the soiled bucket in her hands, trying her best to ignore the acrid scent of her own expulsion.

‘Sensory memory,’ Clarke says when her body stops seizing. She smiles dully around the taste of vomit lingering between her teeth. ‘I guess I just have limits on everything now.’

Lexa doesn’t try to feed her meat again.

 

\--

 

It is well after midday and Nyle is mumbling something that is slowly starting to sound more like his name - over and over, a little more legible each time. Clarke sits still on the stone bench and sketches him, eternalising the frustration in his eyes on thick parchment while she wonders if trying to speak without a tongue feels anything like trying to form a fist with missing fingers. The sound of frantic footsteps interrupts their session and one of Lexa’s advisors rushes up the garden path into their field of view. 

‘Skaikru have come to Polis,’ the attendant says when he reaches them, eyes flitting uncomfortably between Clarke and the ground beneath his feet. ‘Heda requests that you attend the throne room presently.’

Clarke is slow to comply, wracked by the turbulence of the query. She takes her time to pack her parchment away and by the time she pushes up onto unsteady feet Nyle has her crutches ready and waiting for shaking hands. He walks beside her back towards the tower, quiet and patient, while the anxious counsellor who came to fetch them walks five or six paces ahead of them and tuts loudly every time he glances back to check their progress.

She has the silent length of all nine lifts up to the top of the tower (and every passageway and stairwell in between) to inhale and force composure; by the time they reach the throne room floor she is almost made of stone.

The doors are open and the guards set to welcome her, and when Clarke limps her way across the threshold with her crutches clicking gently on the concrete floor she is greeted by one set of tired eyes and three pairs surprised.

‘Clarke,’ Lexa intones kindly; Abby Griffin echoes it with a sense of shock, with heartbreak colouring the words. She rushes forward, wraps a battered Clarke with her battered crutches in the tightest embrace she can and cries, and all of the stone that Clarke has built in her bones turns to ice instead.

‘I was so worried,’ the Chancellor says. ‘I thought you might have - thought you were -’ 

‘Unhand her.’

The words come, stark and sudden, with all the voraciousness and commanding presence that Lexa contains. Clarke hears it as though through water. The arms around her neck tighten; her ears pound with the fast rhythm of her own heartbeat, rampant and wild.

‘What?’ she hears her mother ask, distant in her mind and far too close to her body. Clarke’s breath stutters in her chest.

‘Let her _go,_ Chancellor,’ she is sure Lexa repeats, but the words are not what saves her. 

It is Nyle who reaches out with stone fingers to pry Abby’s arms away and bodily push her backwards across the concrete floor; he stands as a buffer in front of the blonde and stares icily at the Chancellor until she ceases trying to get past him and turns her blazing eyes to the Commander instead.

‘What have you done to my daughter?’ Clarke hears her ask, and the flagrant accusation is enough to drag her back into her fragile body. 

She tightens her grip on her crutches and moves forward with her head down, stepping past her mother’s taught form - past Raven and Bellamy in the centre of the room, staring at her like a ghost and a stranger and salvation all at once - and making her way up to the dais where Lexa stands.

‘Clarke,’ the Commander mumbles quietly while Clarke goes about the well-practiced motion of turning herself around. 

‘ _Ait_ ,’ Clarke mutters. ‘I’m fine.’ Then to her mother, watching her from across the room with a heavy brow and a miserable scowl: ‘Lexa helped to heal my wounds - not to cause them.’

‘We thought you were dead!’ Bellamy calls, scandalised, half a second before Raven says ‘What’s with the crutches, Clarke?’

‘I’m not, obviously,’ she tells Bellamy dryly before offering Raven the barest hint of a smile. ‘And I’m not taking my pants off to show you.’

Lexa makes a grumbling noise beside her, quiet enough for only Clarke to hear, and earns a light tap on her boot from one of Clarke’s crutches disguised as an uncomfortable shift of stance. She glances to her left to see the Commander cross her arms over her chest and scowl.

‘What brings you to Polis?’ Clarke asks when it is clear that nothing is incoming from the brunette.

‘That’s not - have you been here this _whole time_?’ Bellamy asks, and Clarke can almost find it in herself to be maddened by his tone: the betrayal he projects so clearly across the concrete floor as though he is cheated by her well-being, as though his time in Arkadia surrounded by friends who still see him as a hero has been _hard_ for him.

‘Clarke has been here for seven weeks, not more,’ Lexa says stiffly. ‘And you would do well not to take that tone with her in my presence.’

‘Whatever she’s told you to earn your trust is a lie, Clarke,’ Bellamy says before anyone else can - though it’s clear that Abby is only a half-step behind him, held back by her understanding of politics and diplomatic words. ‘She betrayed us at the mountain, and now we’re pretty damned sure she let her people slaughter ours out in the woods, too.’

Nyle shifts on the floor by the doors where she left him and sinks back against the wall; Clarke’s stomach roils, and even with the lax description she knows of what they speak. 

Her actions always come back to haunt her somehow.

‘You are mistaken, Bellamy Blake,’ Lexa says, and she is surely statuesque but Clarke can hear the indignation, the fury, the curiosity in her tone. ‘I have approved no such action. What is this “slaughter” that you bring to me in accusation?’

‘A faction of our people,’ Bellamy spits, ‘survivors from the sky. Farmers. Gentle souls.’ And isn’t that a word: “gentle”. Clarke wants to laugh; Clarke wants to vomit. ‘All found dead in a camp not even a week from Arkadia. _Your_ territory.’

‘But not her doing,’ Clarke says, mouth dry and strained around the words. She earns Bellamy’s gaze again, and his ire.

‘I don’t know what she told you, but you need to believe me when I -’

‘Lexa didn’t do it,’ Clarke cuts in firmly, setting aside her exhaustion to wave him off with her lame, fingerless hand. She revels in the way his face pales at the view, knowing that what comes next will make him stumble. ‘She didn’t kill those people, Bell.’

‘And how do you _know_ that?’ he asks, ready to rake her over the coals for the sake of his own pride, his belief, his stubborn soul. ‘How do you know she hasn’t lied to you, Clarke? How do you _know_ she didn’t kill them all?’

She braces herself for the fallout - the nuclear bomb she’s primed to drop on the family she could never have and left behind - grips her crutches tight enough to turn her knuckles white and says:

‘Because _I_ did.’


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to talk shit about this AU with me or look at all my terrible drawings RE: Clarke's injuries you can do that [here](http://caelzorah.tumblr.com/tagged/fic%3A-monsters-like-me).

‘What do you mean “you -’

‘You can’t be -’

‘Well now I know you’re -’

‘- did this”?’

‘- serious, you’re joking r-’

‘- covering for the -’

‘ _Enough!_ ’ the Commander orders loudly, cutting off all three of the Sky People as they try to drown each other out. The silence is abrupt, and tense, and Lexa glares down at them all in warning from her spot on the dais before turning her attention to Clarke. ‘This camp is where Nyle brought you from?’

‘Yes,’ the blonde confirms. Clarke sees the way that Lexa’s gaze runs the length of her body, lingering on every injury, imagining every patch of healing skin beneath her clothes.

‘I have not pushed to know what happened to you, Clarke, but if you’d like to speak privately on the matter my staff already have rooms waiting for the Chancellor’s party,’ Lexa says gently. 

It is an order from the heda: exposure of the truth after all of these weeks for the sake of politics, no matter the cost. It is an _offer_ from the girl beneath: privacy, the promise of a liberal ear, protection from the scowling Arkadians standing with them in the room. Lexa is asking her for the facts so that she may handle them in Clarke’s stead and it is sweet of her, but unnecessary.

‘They’ll want to hear it from me,’ she mutters. ‘And I’ll only say it once.’

‘Maybe stop talking like we’re not here and actually _explain_ ,’ Bellamy calls, earning another scowl from the Commander and continuing in spite of it. ‘What happened to Farm Station?’

Clarke pauses to take a deep breath, hoping the cool air will calm her tense muscles. She is not prepared to say these things - but she probably never will be.

‘They landed in Ice Nation territory,’ Clarke says dully. ‘Food was hard to find, and hunting was harder than they expected. Ice Nation scouts would have gone to investigate the crash site almost as soon as they touched down.’

‘And _attacked_ them,’ Bellamy says for her. Clarke shrugs.

‘I haven’t met the Queen to ask, and wouldn’t deem to assume,’ she says.

‘Then what do you think happened to the rest of the farmers?’ the young man asks, fury running rampant in every accusatory word. ‘We found less than half of them in their camp. They didn’t just _disappear_.’

‘No,’ Clarke agrees stiffly. ‘They didn’t. They were consumed.’

The statement is met by puzzled eyes from all angles. Over by the door, Nyle stares at the concrete beneath his feet and blocks out the rest of the world; Clarke wishes she could do the same.

‘What do you mean, Clarke?’ her mother questions, warring as ever between the rigidity of her Chancellorship and the compassion of motherhood. Clarke glances at her for a short moment, feels her lip curl with the bitter taste in her mouth and fixes her gaze on the wall over the heads of everyone who matters.

‘I found Charles Pike while I was hunting in the woods and went back to camp with him. He and the others seemed off, but he was my old teacher so I gave him the benefit of the doubt,’ she explains, fingers clenching tightly at the grip of her crutches. ‘I told him about Camp Jaha and offered to show him the way. He was eager - had me mark it down on a map. Then he knocked me unconscious, tied me up, and put me in a tent with the other prisoners.’

For all her propensity for brashness, Abby is apparently content to wait for answers so long as they are evidently coming; she does not speak during the short pause. Raven is silent, thoughtful - much like Lexa, statuesque at Clarke’s side. Bellamy, on the other hand, is everything she expects of him: indignant, unaware, perhaps attached to the memory of their earth skills teacher the way he was in the sky.

‘There _were_ no prisoners,’ he argues, but does not fight the inclusion of Pike’s name. Telling. ‘We checked the camp. We were thorough. They were all Farm Station.’

‘There were three,’ Clarke disputes, eyes flashing. She remembers Nyle’s friends; he has told her their names, written them in his shaking script and seared them into her mind forever. ‘Azgeda. Captured hunters. I watched on the first night as Pike had his men cut out their tongues. I got to keep mine because he liked to _talk_. Our conversations about wartime philosophy were the highlight of his days. He liked to bring it up as he dragged me through the woods with his sixty-three lapdogs guarding the line.’

It’s the number that hooks them. The moment that she mentions Pike’s tally of the farm station survivors her mother’s eyes darken and Bellamy’s shoulders shift back, straightening like a steel rod has been shoved down the length of his spine.

‘In the night he’d take a limb from one of the prisoners and sew up the stump,’ she says. ‘We would all sit in the tent with our hands tied to our ankles behind our backs and watch. Two of his men would hold the hunter down, and the third would cut, and Pike would just _stand there_. The saw was dull from how much they’d used it. Even without his tongue, Rollo screamed. And when they were done they left us there to sleep in his pooling blood so we could walk again in the morning.’

Her mother’s skin is turning the most fascinating shade of white. Clarke doesn’t know why she feels gratified by that.

‘When Rollo ran out of blood to lose and limbs to walk on they cut off his head and smoked him,’ she says clinically. ‘The next week they did the same to Erik. We were a week from Arkadia when they found the jobi nuts. I didn’t warn them, just - waited. Wanted it to kick in. Nyle managed to untie me - and then we killed them. Every last one. All sixty-four of them, high as kites and defenceless - I bled them all.’

It is so separate from the way she murdered the mountain - so close, _personal_. Maybe that is why her mother stares at her with something that looks a lot like fear in her eyes and asks her:

‘Why?’

Clarke blinks, nonplussed. All those words and they still don’t understand - all that retelling and they just _don’t get it_. Her hands ache when she unwraps them from her crutch handles to spread them out beside her, to gesture at her clothed and broken body. Maybe she was wrong in joking with Raven - maybe she should loosen the belt of her trousers and show them the mutilated flesh of her thigh. Maybe when they see how grotesque she is - how they mangled her and tore into her flesh, and her mind - they will stop questioning. Maybe if she shows them her _finger bones_ …

She raises her right hand a little higher to highlight the missing parts, clutches at the pouch around her neck that holds the missing pieces but doesn't take it off. Raven looks vaguely green, Bellamy wide eyed, Abby white as a ghost and shaking. Beside her Lexa is practically stone, not even swaying with the flow of her breath.

‘Human flesh tastes a lot like boar,’ Clarke says dully, ‘or so Hannah said when she ate mine.’

The silence that follows the statement is stifling. Clarke waits for a long moment before dropping her hand back to grip her crutches and hopping down from the throne platform. It’s enough, she thinks, for her mother to refrain from accusing the Trigedakru any further. It’s enough for her - more than - and she wants to go back down to the gardens with Nyle and listen to his wordless mumbling; it reminds her of those weeks with Pike, because everything does now, but not painfully. The scent of cooking meat makes her stomach roil and even the _thought_ of speaking about it spurs ice in her chest, but Nyle’s voice has only ever granted her a wistful kind of warmth, hope for recovery, and the quiet, calming sense of being protected.

Abby’s eyes track her every move: the rhythmic tap of the crutches on the concrete through the thin rug, the way the pads rub and chafe beneath her shoulders, the way Clarke’s head bows to avoid eye contact. In spite of her attention Abby doesn’t _speak_ \- and for that Clarke is grateful.

But there are worse things than words, and Bellamy Blake has always been adept at finding them.

This time it is in the way he steps forward as she moves to pass and reaches out to grip her arm. His fingers are a vice digging into her flesh, gripping lax muscle and squeezing the bone. The grip will leave bruises - but before that it will make her heart stutter and clench, her shoulders tighten, her throat close up before it dries.

The contact lacks Lexa’s respect and Nyle’s understanding, and Clarke’s breath halts in her chest. Her teeth grind and her neck hurts from straining, and her fingers shake in spite of the fist they have formed into around the handles of her crutches. By the doors Nyle straightens - scowling, hostile. 

‘You don’t get to lie to us and leave,’ Bellamy says. ‘I remember Pike - and I don’t believe you.’

Clarke feels the crutch fall from her right hand almost absently, too busy with the sensation of her shirt slowly sticking to her sweat-soaked back. She is panicking and she knows it, but it doesn’t cease the thought. Her body moves ahead of her mind, lifting the left crutch for her right hand to hold and whirling to jam the central strut into his stomach with all the force she can muster.

The hand on her arm withdraws to clutch at a winded stomach, and Bellamy hunches forward as a reflex; it is _not enough_. Clarke stumbles back on weak legs, flips the crutch in her hands until the central strut is in both her hands and _swings_. The light metal and the leather covered shoulder pad cracks across his face with enough force to bend itself backwards, and Bellamy is knocked promptly on his ass. Clarke’s weak leg crumples beneath her weight after a frantic moment, and it is the only reason she doesn’t follow up with another blow.

Nyle is at her side right on time. He keeps his hands to himself and lets Clarke grab for his shoulder to keep herself upright. There is a part of her that wants to thank him, and maybe later will - but for now she is shaking from head to toe, furious, all traces of fear slinking out of sight.

‘Touch me again and I’ll fucking kill you,’ she spits out, eyes widening at her own words. She doesn’t stop them, can’t, hardly wants to. Bellamy’s hands are unwelcome; his defence of Pike is unwarranted, is sick, is enough to make the acid curdle in her stomach. He doesn’t know - he doesn’t _know_ , but: ‘I don’t _owe_ you proof. I won’t show you where they peeled off my skin so they could eat it raw. I won’t show you the scars. I won’t show you the teeth marks left on my bones. I won’t _show you that_. But if you ever, _ever_ put a hand on me again, I _will_ show you _exactly_ what I did to Pike.’

‘ _Wanheda_.’

When she speaks, the Commander’s voice is firm. There is the slightest tone of reproach there, and Clarke flares up for a moment at the chiding before the name sinks in: Wanheda, Commander of Death. It cows her. It is not a name she ever wanted, but it is moments like these in which she earned it - and that is why Lexa uses it now. To remind her; to pull her back. She is on the brink of something fetid and ugly - something that has crawled into her bones and fused itself between her vertebrae without her ever knowing - and it thrills her.

And _sickens_ her. 

She wonders if Pike was ever this way - warring between eager and guilty, repentance subsiding -  and it makes her want to vomit, as though perhaps if she does she can purge herself of the feeling. But then - she’s thrown up plenty since arriving in Polis and it has changed nothing. Not once has there been an ounce of sin expelled with the wealth of bile, nor has it made her feel lighter; she is still mutilated, inside and out.

‘Clarke,’ Lexa calls this time, earning the blonde’s gaze. The Commander is statuesque, several steps closer than she was before though Clarke doesn’t know when she covered the distance. The brunette is stiff-jawed, staring with steel eyes, and when she speaks it is not a suggestion. ‘Nyle will take you to the baths while we finish here.’

For a moment Clarke considers contesting the dismissal - they wanted this, wanted to know what happened, wanted to know what she’d become in her time away, they _all wanted this_ \- but she doesn’t. Lexa’s eyes are cold, but Nyle hums almost silently beside her and it lilts on Clarke’s ears. Her heart calms in her chest and she lets the Azgeda lead her limping form from the room. 

There are five long seconds of silence after the throne room doors thud closed behind them. These are Clarke’s last five seconds of coherency.

 

\--

 

The walk to the baths is a mess of moments: her leg caving entirely in spite of Nyle’s support, the swoop of her stomach as the Azgeda scoops her up, the rhythmic lurch of his footsteps, a dozen glimpses of a dozen hallways, the clogging scent of woodsmoke and flowers and human musk as she shoves her face in his shirt and muffles her sobs.

Lexa’s staff have probably seen her crying and weak, and it means nothing, nothing,  _nothing_ because she could kill them all and never regret a thing.

 

\--

 

The bath water is warm like Rollo’s blood and she tries to drown herself in it.

 

\--

 

Clarke doesn’t move from her bed after Nyle puts her there. She lies on her side facing the window and watches the sky dim outside, blue sky turning a slew of deep orange and purple hues before fading to black. There is a familiar comfort in the stillness: like always, time passes and the world outside goes on without her.

She is insignificant - and perhaps if her limbs weren’t so heavy, and her chest weren’t so hollow, and her skull didn’t ache behind her eyes she may even have found happiness in the fact. 

Her curtains rustle with the breeze, exposing the glow of the stars, and Nyle moves around the room to light candles for the night but otherwise leaves her alone. He seems content to sit in his armchair silently and let her have peace. Occasionally she hears the scribble of charcoal on paper floating towards her from his direction but it sounds - like all things - distant, as though coming to her through water. Clarke wonders if the bathwater slunk through her ear canals and into her brain while she tried so unsuccessfully to hold herself under; if there is water and oil and soap in her skull and that is why the rest of the world seems so far from her reach.

If she turned her head, if she just rolled her body even the slightest, maybe she would know - maybe she would hear the sloshing sound in her ears, the slow swing of pressure and the return to equilibrium. Maybe she could be _present_ and finally _all there_.

She can’t.

It would be so easy - so _easy_ and so small a motion - but Clarke cannot make it happen. There is no point, nothing good to come of right-mindedness, no kindness to come from getting involved in the life outside of this room and this bed and _this exact position_ on her furs. She could do it - could move and make something of herself, and talk politics and put her people first, and she is sure that it is expected of her. She _should_ do it - be the leader they always need, be alive, face the world. But she just - _can’t_.

The furs are curled around her, but it is not that she is comfortable - nothing is now that there is new, raw skin being pressed against something _all the time_. It is the heaviness of her body glueing her to the mattress, the emptiness in her stomach too much to be tempered by food. It is the fact that the world outside will change in spite of her, perhaps for the better, and it is easier to watch it happen than to be a part of it. It is the effort she no longer has to give, the faithlessness set deep in her bones bolstered by the cross-hatching of her skin and her cratered thigh.

It may be an hour after dark or more when the knock comes at her door, and Clarke is both crucially aware of the sound and absent from it. Nyle must move to answer it because the sound of muffled speech and the rustling of parchment comes to her from across the room before light footsteps track towards the bedside at Clarke’s back.

‘You missed dinner,’ the Commander mutters stiffly. Clarke imagines herself shrugging but can’t bring her shoulders to follow the motion. When no response comes Lexa sighs, and the sound is accompanied by the sound of ceramic clattering on the bedside table - a plate, probably, piled with whatever sustenance the Commander thinks she needs. Clarke cannot stomach the thought of eating.

The mattress dips with the weight of another body - Lexa sliding up to sit against the headboard, a foot of empty space separating them on the bed - and Clarke cannot even bring herself to flinch at the proximity. She is too exhausted to care that there is a body at her back, unseen, and she doesn’t know if it should please her to be so fearless or sadden her to be so vacant.

Lexa doesn’t speak about the scene in the throne room or the things that were said; she does not broach the subject of Clarke’s injuries and the people who gave them to her; she does not mention Abby and Raven and Bellamy and what they are doing now or what they expect. Instead, the Commander sits silently and lets Clarke trace constellations through her bedroom window. There are storm clouds forming on the horizon, thick and dark and muffling the light of distant suns, and Clarke is enamoured by them. It may be minutes or hours or eons before Lexa breaks the silence again, her voice low, rasping and _hurting._

‘I can’t claim justice from the dead,’ she says, ‘but I don’t know how else to help you.’

It tugs at something - some dying spark of light being swallowed by the void in Clarke’s chest. Her fingers twitch where they rest on the furs before her, and her hand feels like lead when she tries to lift it. The sound of her shirtsleeve scraping against her furs grates roughly at her ears, but nonetheless she drags her hollow left arm back over her body to search for Lexa’s hand.

She intertwines their fingers while the clouds roll in outside and hopes that Lexa understands the meaning: _This is enough._

 

\--

 

Tall grass brushes at her legs, and the skin of her face stings with the spit of icy rain. The sky above her is dark and roiling, ominous with the threat of a downpour yet to come. She stands unassisted in the whipping wind and this is how she knows that she is dreaming.

Even this awareness doesn’t temper the rage in her chest when she looks forward and lays eyes on Charles Pike; he is smiling and self-assured with a bowl of bubbling stew in his hands and the sky above them rumbles darkly when he raises it towards her.

‘I wanted you to be one of us, Clarke,’ he calls, and the bowl in his hands swirls with dark broth and chunks of meat lined with blue ink across the skin. ‘I didn’t realise you already were.’

The tempest unleashes above them and red blood blossoms in spots across Pike’s chest, staining his stolen white furs - every wound she gave him renewed by the harsh stab of hail and rain. Pike soaks red with blood and laughs and laughs and laughs until the booming timbre of his howling sounds the same as the deafening thunder crashing high overhead.

Clarke wakes to the sound of a thunderclap that shakes everything from the room around her to the heart beating in her chest. She can make out her curtains flapping wildly in the wind, can feel the occasional piercing prick on her face of the ice cold raindrops that the gale brings in. 

There is a hurricane inside her ribcage and outside her window, and the solid feeling of Lexa’s warm fingers threaded between her own is the only way she knows she’s not still dreaming.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to talk shit about this AU with me or look at all my terrible drawings RE: Clarke's injuries you can do that [here](http://caelzorah.tumblr.com/tagged/fic%3A-monsters-like-me).

Clarke does not leave her bed for anything other than relieving herself and bathing. There are no new injuries on her skin - save for the dark bruises Bellamy’s fingers left looping around her bicep - but her limbs are heavy and absent of energy, and it is hard to leave her furs. Nyle reads for most of the day, seated on the couch across the room and reminding her of his presence with every turn of the page.

No one visits and Clarke is grateful for that.

The sun does not come out until mid afternoon when the last night’s storm clouds finally begin to disperse. Lexa returns then, announcing herself with a soft knock at the door and padding over to rest on the bed. Clarke does not roll to face her and Lexa does not ask her to. Nor does she adopt the tone of concern that Clarke is dreading and speak of any other obvious things: “you have not eaten yet today”, or “you cannot stay in bed forever”, or “this isn’t healthy”. Instead they lie in silence for a long while, nothing but the sound of even breathing and the rasping turn of each page in Nyle’s book echoing in the space around them.

They stay this way for more time than Clarke cares to count - enough so that the rise and fall of her chest slows and her eyelids start to slide closed. Clarke is sluggish and relaxed, contemplating sleep when Lexa finally speaks.

‘Would you come down to the gardens with me, Clarke?’

The blonde doesn’t respond for a time; her blood is as sluggish in her veins as her brain is in her head, and even the thought of the walk down to the gardens is incomprehensible. Even with Lexa allowing her all the time in the world the only reply she manages is a tiny shrug of her shoulders as she cringes into her sheets.

Behind her Lexa shifts on the mattress but does not sigh or grumble or complain. She seems, as ever, absent of exasperation - and somewhere between her ribs Clarke feels something ache.

‘I know you’re tired and it seems so very far away,’ Lexa mumbles, ‘but the sun has come out. I could read to you or tell you stories. We could have tea or stay out until the sun goes down and the fireflies come out and I could call down a meal. I just - I can’t think of any better way to spend the afternoon than sitting in the gardens with you.’

Clarke is loath to leave her bed, but Lexa sounds wistful and lovely and has spent more than a month dressing the blonde’s wounds and handling her damage. If Clarke cannot do this one tiny (insurmountable) thing for her then what’s the point?

‘M’mom?’ she grumbles after a short silence between lips that struggle to part for the words.

‘She will not come to you today. I sent her out with a guide to see the city,’ the Commander says. ‘It’d just be you and me - and Nyle, if that would please you.’

There is a long, hollow silence before Clarke manages even to make her fingers twitch. It is longer still until she manages to bend her rigid joints, drag her reluctant muscles into responsiveness and pull herself upright. It is not until she has dropped one foot to the floor and dragged her disfigured leg after it with stiff fingers, achingly empty from head to toe, that she recognises the real hurdle of the afternoon. She stares at her knees, dull-eyed, and barely manages to frown at the sound of Lexa’s body moving again behind her.

‘Clarke?’ the Commander prompts when she has shuffled to sit on the bed beside the still blonde, soft boots flat on the floor and her movement unimpeded.

When Clarke tries to speak she finds her mouth dry, tongue heavy behind her teeth.

‘It’s -’ she starts, and swallows thickly when the rasp of her voice crackles around the sound. Her throat is tight and she feels tears prick at her eyes. ‘- crutches.’

Specifically: she has none. She bent one over Bellamy’s head and the other was never returned to her. If she is going to make weapons of them maybe they shouldn’t be.

The Commander offers her palms up, fingers curved slightly - without heat, force, or accusation - and Clarke knows that she could fall backwards and stay in bed and Lexa wouldn’t mind. The walk will be long and painful, and Lexa’s offer of assistance will come with the searing heat of her body pressed into Clarke’s side, burning her out of feeble skin; she could curl back up beneath the furs and let the rest of the day go by and this beautiful girl wouldn’t blame her for a second of it. But then: doesn’t she deserve better than that? Better than waiting on someone so set on wasting away?

Clarke takes the hand she is offered.

 

\--

 

By the time Lexa lowers her to the bench seat Clarke is breathless, muscles tense, leg aching. Her body is taut from the extended contact but it is not like it was in the beginning: she is not crawling out of her skin. Maybe it is because of the weeks that have passed in her company, the slow acclimation to Lexa’s touch and scent and presence; maybe instead it is just that she is exhausted and half out of her mind, and nothing today has felt the way it should.

Whatever the reason, when Lexa steps back to put distance between them Clarke is caught somewhere between the familiar relief and something else - something that almost feels like disappointment.

Nyle has followed them down with a stack of books and sketching materials in his hands and he hands them over to Lexa as soon as she asks for them. He is turning to search the grounds for a place to sit and take up guard when Clarke calls for him.

‘Sorry,’ she says when she has his attention, slumped forward on the stone bench. ‘This is not how your days should be.’

The hunter strides over to crouch before her, balancing easily on the balls of his feet and bringing his blue eyes almost level with Clarke’s. He lifts one heavy hand to tap at his own chest, right over his heart, and then reaches out towards her - slowly so as not to startle - and points at her heart in turn.

‘Cordes sang,’ she says because Nyle can’t. The Azgeda bares white teeth with the width of his smile and Clarke feels the dull tone of affection resound within her ribcage, muted by exhaustion and the slow flow of her blood. She forces a small smile and lifts shaking fingers to trace the line of his jaw, fascinated by the feeling of his dark stubble beneath her fingertips. ‘It should go both ways.’

The fondness in Nyle’s gaze is warm enough to burn her; it brings red to sallow cheeks, and Clarke has to fight not to duck her head in the face of his devotion. He will run himself ragged to keep her safe, weather life’s storms in her stead if the opportunity presents itself to him, and she knows this. Lexa has told her:  _Cordes Sang_ , the bond of the Azgeda worth more than life itself. But she also knows Nyle now - the hard lines of his body softening over time, the way that he smiles, the frustrated sounds he makes when he is stumbling over the words the Skaikru took away from him - and he is _good_ , or as close to it as a person can be. He should not seem expendable - least of all for her.

‘Nyle,’ Lexa calls, leaps and bounds ahead of Clarke’s absent mind and content to speak on her behalf. Her tone is formal: a petition from one protector to another, rife with an understanding of duty. ‘You are welcome to stay, but if there is some other way you would like to spend this time you are free to do so. Clarke will be safe with me.’

He seems troubled by the offer and Clarke knows that it is because, at least in part, it appeals to him. She nods and pats at his cheek.

‘If you need time for yourself you can take it,’ she tells him. ‘You’ve made my happiness your priority, so yours should also be mine.’

It takes several long moments of his searching stare and another firm nod from Clarke before he stands and makes to leave, and even then he glances back to her over his shoulder three times as he is walking away. Clarke smiles a little less weakly, bolstered by the depth of his concern, and waves him away with her good hand.

‘Where do you think he’s going?’ Lexa asks when Nyle is out of sight. It is just the two of them, alone amidst the vivid sight and scents of the Polis gardens, surrounded by all the colour and life that Clarke feels absent of. The blonde tilts her head back, eyelids slipping closed against the sunlight and wondering at the warmth of it on her skin.

‘He’s got friends in the city,’ Clarke says quietly. ‘So maybe to see them. Maybe to the fighting pits to train - he hasn’t done that at all since we got here but I know it was part of his normal routine before.’

‘Nyle’s injuries may not have been as harsh as yours, Clarke, but he still needed time to recover from them,’ Lexa reasons thoughtfully, and Clarke hears the shuffle of her clothing as she drops down to the bench at Clarke’s side. ‘Not to mention malnutrition. Neither of you were in a particularly good way when you arrived.’

‘That’s part of it, sure,’ she says. ‘But there’s also the demand of servitude I seem to exude-’

‘Clarke,’ Lexa chides lightly, sighing with exasperation when the blonde continues with barely a nod of acknowledgement.

‘- which, fine, _Cordes Sang_ , I get it: protect the porcelain princess at all costs and god forbid she shatter,’ Clarke grumbles. ‘It’s also that I can’t fight, or run, or even walk unassisted on a good day - and he doesn’t want to rub it in.’

‘You are many things, Clarke, but a ‘princess’ is not one of them,’ Lexa says firmly. There is enough bite in her words to coax Clarke’s eyes open and earn her gaze. She wonders if Lexa’s vehemence comes from the fact that she knows princes and princesses in clan culture, or if it is that she detects the derogatory nature of the word that the Skaikru have forced into Clarke’s tone; from the words that follow she gathers it’s the latter. ‘You are a victim, and a warrior, and a veteran home from war, but you are _not_ a princess.’

Perhaps it is the fire in Lexa’s eyes, the faith, the certainty - or maybe still it is the weariness in Clarke’s bones echoing out through every failing cell, every pore, every scar - but Clarke finds herself offering only a reluctant hum in reply. She could argue, and maybe she would have - if this conversation had occurred three months ago, before her innocence fell beneath the weight of a mountain, and Hannah took her fingers, and the Flayer stripped her of her skin, and Pike choked to death on his own blood and the last her autonomy.

There is not enough passion left within her to argue, so Clarke turns her back to Lexa on the benchtop and lowers herself to lie across it instead. Lexa’s form is stiff while Clarke cushions her head on a leather-clad thigh.

‘You gonna read to me, Commander?’ Clarke asks with her eyes closed and the barest hint of a smile on her lips. She doesn’t look for any evidence of Lexa’s surprise - doesn’t need to because they both know that this initiation of contact is big, huge, monumental. And still somehow it’s nothing at all.

There is hesitation - caution before Lexa puts her pile of papers and charcoal aside and salvages whichever book she chose to bring down from her library - and then Clarke hears the quiet rustle of pages being flipped. Lexa clears her throat, and Clarke is sure it is to expel the thick drawl of emotion from her tone; if so, she doesn’t succeed.

Lexa reads to her with a warm tone, smoothly annunciating every important syllable and pausing only to ask permission before she lightly tangles one hand into blonde hair. With the light, pleasant scratch of short fingernails at her scalp and the warmth of the waning sunlight on her pallid skin, Clarke dozes for most of the afternoon. Nyle returns after night has fallen with a smile on his face and a tray piled high with food in his hands. Fireflies dance patterns of light in the air around them while they eat, and speak, and Nyle shares stories of his afternoon in scribbles on abandoned parchment.

Later, when Lexa has helped her back up to her quarters at the tower top and Nyle has settled himself on the couch for the night, Clarke stares out at the stars through the swaying curtains and realises this is the only time she recalls herself being even vaguely happy.

 

\--

 

Nyle sits stiffly on the couch across the room, a perfect echo of Clarke’s rigid posture.

She is seated on the edge of her mattress, feet flat on the concrete floor, and her shoulders have crawled halfway up her neck with the tension. She has her trousers rucked down around her knees while her mother traces the length of her scars, probing the raw skin with a touch that is clinical but still too warm for Clarke's comfort. The doctor hums and hahs, and Clarke has that familiar bubbling sensation beneath her skin - the irritation, the slight hint at blistering and pulling apart that she has overcome in part with Lexa’s touch and Nyle, and no one else.

Half the colour left Abby’s face the moment she saw the ropy scar across Clarke’s cratered thigh but Clarke doesn’t think it’s penance enough for the way she has to tense her whole body to keep from shuddering.

‘This wound is… very serious, Clarke,’ Abby says eventually, slumping back in the chair she has pulled up to Clarke’s bedside.

‘What gave it away?’ Clarke asks. ‘Because it clearly couldn’t have been the gaping hole.’

Her mother purses her lips at the snark, but across the room Nyle relaxes just a fraction. He takes it for reassurance that Clarke is not about to come out of her skin, or bare her teeth and bloody her mother’s body - and maybe that is what it is. Perhaps he thinks the monster she can be comes from her trauma, and not from the marrow in her bones. If so he is sadly mistaken; it is rampant in her blood, along with all the familial cells that make her sit quietly and let her mother examine her healing wounds in spite of the upset it causes.

‘If nothing else at least you’re able to joke about it,’ the doctor remarks, every syllable unimpressed. ‘But I’m not sure you understand the gravity of the situation.’

‘You’re acting like I didn’t study anatomy since age ten,’ Clarke replies dryly. ‘My quads are all but gone. I know what that means.’

‘Do you?’ Abby asks. Clarke forgives her for the hint of condescension because she knows it must be difficult to see a stranger in your daughter’s skin. ‘Without any scans, I can say straight off the bat: you’re never going to run again. There will be damage, if not complete loss, to hip flexion and knee extension. Even after six months of therapy - assuming the absolute best - maybe you’ll be able to walk on flat ground. But even the slightest slope is out of the question - let alone stairs. And forget about jumping or squatting.’

‘Squatting? _No_ ,’ Clarke says, playing at aghast. This is only confirmation of what she already knew. ‘I guess the camping lifestyle is out then.’

Across the room Nyle snorts, amused. He is the only one; she appreciates him for it all the more.

‘Be serious about this, Clarke,’ her mother chides. ‘I can’t guarantee anything, but maybe with surgery-’

‘The muscle is _gone_ , mom,’ she cuts in. ‘There _is_ no surgery to fix that. It got infected and they had to cut it out, and it won’t grow back. Don’t go searching for answers that don’t exist.’

‘Maybe a brace, then, like Raven’s,’ Abby offers. What follows sends ice down her spine. ‘When we’re done here and we get back to Arkadia she can measure you up. I’m sure she’ll come up with something.’

‘I’m not _going_ to Arkadia,’ Clarke says stiffly.

Abby stills in her chair and blinks back at her daughter as though the words shock her; then her brow furrows, lip curling down in that disappointed scowl that Clarke is all too accustomed to now. These are the versions of her mother that Clarke knows best: frazzled and worrying, or fuming beneath the belief of “holier than thou”.

‘You’re my daughter, Clarke, and I won’t leave you out here to face the world alone - especially not when you’re-’ she has the decency to cut herself off at least, but her eyes track obviously toward Clarke’s scarred thigh.

‘Disabled?’ Clarke spits. ‘You can say it. It’s the truth, after all.’

‘That’s exactly the reason that Arkadia will be the safest place for you,’ Abby appeals - and it’s obvious, the way she steps around it, the way she avoids the term. Further proof that Abby Griffin has always been particularly adept at avoiding the truth, even when it is staring her straight in the face. ‘We have better ways of accommodating your condition.’

‘Like shoving me in a back room to sit around and play with toys the way you did with Raven?’ She pauses to catch her breath, to cool the flames burning low in her gut and yank the cotton trousers back up over her thighs. The scar is grievously ugly and she has known this since she first laid eyes on it, back when it was fresh and zigzagged with silk stitches - but her mother is the first person to make her feel like it is true. ‘No. I don’t want that life. I won’t come with you - because I have seen what _Skaikru_ do, and I will not let it happen to me.’

It is probably the way she pulls her pant leg tight across her thigh to mask the divot that gives her away - or perhaps instead it’s how she covers her left hand with her right to hide the stumps of her middle fingers. Either way, the noise that Abby makes is strangled; Clarke cannot find it in herself to sympathise.

‘We didn’t do this to you,’ her mother says, just shy of pleading. ‘Pike and his men weren’t ours. And we would never _condone_ that.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Clarke asks coldly. ‘Isn’t it the only thing you ever tried to teach us all? Earth skills? Survive - at _all_ costs.’ She wants to stand, to walk past her mother and leave her reeling in the ashes of her hypocrisy. There is a crater in her thigh that makes the action impossible. ‘Pike may not have fallen down at your side, but he damn sure brought your mind with him. He killed the children first so the rest of them could survive - and when you sent us down here to test for toxic air you practically did the same. He killed his elderly because they weren’t strong enough to make it through the wilderness, but with the meat on their bones the rest of his men could prosper, the ones with _value_ \- just like how you and all the councillors before you culled the Ark population to conserve air and keep yourselves alive. He killed Azgeda because he thought they were savages, worth less than him - the same thing you would have done with the Trigedakru if I hadn’t intervened.’

Abby opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes out. Clarke’s head is pounding with the furious rush of her blood and she wonders if plunging a dagger into her mother’s chest would make her feel the same way that it did with Pike - relief, satisfaction, another blight cleared from the world. Her stomach turns.

‘It doesn’t matter if you sent him out there or not, Chancellor,’ Clarke says. ‘You may not have put the saw in his hands, but you gave him all the tools he needed: stubbornness, a sense of self-importance and an outlasting will to live. The same things that made me pull the lever in Mount Weather, that fuelled my arms after three weeks of starvation to jam a knife between his ribs until he’d stopped breathing - and then some.’

The doctor swallows - Clarke notes the slow bob of her throat, and wonders if she is biting back bile the same way her daughter has had to almost daily for _months_ now, even before Pike - and takes a long moment to gather herself. Abby is still pale and shaking slightly when she speaks, and Clarke is pleased by it - by the knowledge that here she is with her mother finally kicked off of her high horse, out of control.

‘You need help, Clarke,’ the older woman says, tone small with a minute quiver.

‘For _my_ injuries, or the ones I’ve dished out?’ Clarke asks with a scowl. ‘Because you can’t do a damned thing for the limbs that I’ve lost, and honestly I don’t think you can handle the rest, either. I _killed_ Pike, and all his men. Me. I did that. And it was savage, and bloody, and I _liked_ it. And I loathe myself for it because I can almost justify it - killing sixty-three people just for _my_ freedom - for what they did to me, and in front of me; for how hopeless and sick and abandoned it made me feel; for the moment when Pike put a bowl of human flesh in front of my face and I thought, for even a second “maybe I can do this, maybe it’s not so bad”. I killed them all and I fucking enjoyed it, because as disgusting as it was to roll in their blood at least they’d finally stopped fucking _laughing_.’

Over on the couch Nyle shudders and gets to his feet. He strides towards her with less certain steps than she is used to seeing and a look on his face that is nothing less than anguished. There is something sick and brutal inside of her, clawing to get out, and she tamps it down for the sake of his sweet smile. Nyle would give his life for her - the least she can offer him in return is her sanity.

He does not come to touch her, and it’s obvious from that alone how well he knows her now. Instead he puts a hand on Abby’s shoulder, and from the curl of his fingers she knows it is with enough force to bruise. He does not have a tongue to speak with, but even wordless as it is the direction to stand and leave is apparently clear enough for even Abby Griffin to understand.

‘What else are you going to do, Clarke?’ she manages to ask when she gets to her feet, before Nyle starts to push her towards the door. ‘Where else are you going to go?’

‘Nowhere. I’ll stay right here,’ Clarke tells her, stone again, crushing the beastly part of her back into its corner. ‘This is the only place where I’ve felt - anything - even the slightest bit like - happiness - that I can remember. And you don’t get to take that away from me just because you’ve suddenly decided today’s the day you want to parent.’ Abby reels back as if struck and Clarke scowls at the motion. ‘I’m not going with you when you leave this place. The Ark made enough of a monster out of me in eighteen years, and I won’t give another minute to it.’

Abby leaves with her head bowed and tears running down her face, and Clarke is left sitting on the side of her bed with that familiar hollowness back in her chest. Nyle comes to sit, statuesque, beside her - takes her cold hands only when she offers them and warms them between his own - and Clarke wonders how many books Lexa will have to read to her before the emptiness truly goes away.

 

\--

 

There is a tension in Lexa’s shoulders when she arrives in the late afternoon, so separate from her gentle approach the day before, and Clarke knows that somehow the content of Abby’s visit has been relayed to her. She watches from where she sits with her back pressed against the headboard of her bed as the Commander talks briefly with Nyle - quiet words answered with the prompt scrawl of charcoal on paper - and then offers him leave as though she is relieving him of a guard shift. Given the way the large man glances to Clarke for permission and hesitates by the door even once he has it, perhaps that isn’t so far from the truth.

‘I’ve organised for him to spar with some of my best guards,’ the Commander says, striding over to Clarke’s small dining table to lay hands on the same wooden chair that Abby commandeered earlier in the day. She drags it to Clarke’s bedside as she says, ‘He’s named himself your protector, and it would be a disservice to you if he continued to avoid training and lost his edge.’

‘Like that’s the only reason,’ Clarke teases - or tries to, despite the exhausted rasp of her voice. ‘You want him to have some sense of routine, same as me. You think it’ll make him _happier_.’

‘This is the least that should be done for him, Clarke,’ Lexa says in lieu of a denial. She smiles when she lowers herself to perch on the wooden chair but there is something wooden about it - something fragile and easily burned - and Clarke understands why when the brunette continues with a cautious: ‘And for you.’

It is one thing to see the depth of devotion Nyle presents, but another entirely to see it in Lexa now. Nyle is her comrade in torture and blood, well-acquainted with the sight of her broken and bleeding, vengeful, mad and unhinged; they have screamed, starved, and killed together, and now they recover side by side. Lexa left her at a mountain door to face the world alone, and she is gentle now - and maybe it is guilt, or regret, or love, but it is all in absence of knowledge. Lexa has heard stories of Clarke’s crimes, muddied by distance and time. She has never seen Clarke soaking in blood - she has never seen Clarke _enjoy_ it.

‘Got to wonder why I even need protection,’ the blonde mumbles thickly, tongue heavy in her mouth, tipping her head back to knock against the wood of the headboard and closing her eyes to avoid Lexa’s gaze. ‘Because I’m too weak to look after myself?’

‘Partly, for now,’ Lexa says. Her straightforwardness is refreshing. ‘But also because you are _Wanheda_ , and mountain slayer. You are larger than yourself, Clarke, and that will bring danger to you with or without the use of your leg or the support of your people. Even _heda_ must be protected sometimes. So should you.’

‘Doesn’t mean I deserve it.’

‘That is not for you to decide,’ Lexa tells her firmly. ‘We are often blind to our own worth. But I’ve seen you fight, and argue, and _sacrifice_ over and again for a sense of utopia never meant for yourself. You’ve suffered greatly at the hands of others, for the sake of others - and _that_ , Clarke, is _not_ what you deserve.’

‘I’ve done - terrible things,’ she says with a tight throat and the strangest tickling sensation on her cheeks - tears, she discovers when she lifts her hand to wipe away the feeling. She blinks behind her hands and leaves her eyes open, gaze fixes on the stitching of her pants - because anything is easier than looking at Lexa while leaking darkness from her lips. ‘Things that can’t be forgiven. Shouldn’t be.’

‘Maybe they don’t have to be,’ Lexa tells her simply, something like knowing in her tone. It is easy to forget when most of what she sees of Lexa now is gentle and private but this woman has lived her whole life hunting, caught in tribal politics and growing to lead wars. ‘Maybe it’s enough just to have them understood.’

‘Is that why you stopped me in the throne room the other day?’ the blonde asks. ‘When I was inches away from tearing Bellamy’s throat out - was it “understanding” that fuelled the rebuke, or fear?’

‘You could flood my halls with blood and I would never fear you,’ Lexa says. ‘But I have known betrayal, Clarke. I've had my most trusted man question my judgement, and the worth of my word, and I killed him for it without considering another way. So I stopped you, yes. But I did that for you.’

‘Right,’ Clarke snorts.

‘You doubt that?’

‘Finn killed for me. Wells _died_ for me. My own father made a traitor of himself in the vague hope that I could have a future,’ Clarke says, and the words are bitter in her mouth. Lexa hardly knows who these people are, hardly knows what they meant to her - or should have. She nods along in Clarke’s peripheral vision like the names make sense to her anyway. ‘Everything that has ever been done in my name has been nothing short of destructive; nothing _good_ has ever been done _for me_. I’ve never been spared of guilt before and I don’t deserve to be now.’

‘Clarke,’ comes the soft reply, and Clarke can feel the gaze that goes along with it, ‘you’re wrong. You deserve the world.’

Lexa’s tone is calm and sad, and slightly wistful, and when Clarke opens her eyes to look at the Commander her expression is the same. Clarke wants, for a moment, to reach across the distance between them and pull the woman closer - to press against the curves of her body and share her heat, to be real, and warm, and present, and ease the ache inside of them both with willing contact, to touch and clutch and kiss marred skin as if it will smooth the scars. She wants to be whole, and lovely, and in love.

She wants these things, but cannot have them - not when her skin still crawls at the thought of a light embrace; not when she is wrecked and selfish, and physically cannot bridge the gap.

Not when Lexa deserves better.

Something in her mind says _“then be better”_ , and Clarke pushes herself forward in spite of the exhaustion piling weight onto her aching bones. She twists to sit on the side of the bed, one foot on the floor and the other following when her practiced hands drag her unresponsive leg around to match the motion. Lexa sits calmly and doesn’t move to help her - so unlike Abby earlier in the day who felt the need to coddle, to force her hands onto reluctant limbs and move them on Clarke’s behalf.

‘I don’t know what you see in me,’ the blonde mutters around a lackluster frown, while she wipes the tears from her face. Opposite her the Commander snorts, the slight ghost of jovial light in the forest green of her eyes.

‘Light, compassion, humility, humanity - all the things that it would seem you don’t,’ Lexa says, and her tone may be lighter now but it is no less serious for the fact. ‘You are assertive, and wise, and beautiful, and self-reliant, and I suppose I’ll simply have to remind you of that for as long as it takes to sink in.’

‘Self-reliant? Really? And you don’t think that’s changed at all?’

‘Not for a moment.’

‘Not even with-’ Clarke says and gestures to her lame leg, resigned. Lexa shakes her head as though it is nothing, as though needing crutches and minders and bodily help getting up and down stairs doesn’t make her any less able, doesn’t curb her independence definitively. ‘Because this is it, Lexa. This is my life now. Not all that "self-reliant _"._ I’m never going to walk alone again.’

There is a long moment of consideration while the Commander seems to contemplate the diagnosis, and then forges on in spite of it. Lexa’s lip curls up with fragile affection and she offers her hands forward when she says ‘You should never have to.’

Her outstretched palms are calloused, but no less inviting for the fact, and Clarke stares for a long, cautious moment because the offer is more than momentary. This is supplication masked as care: Lexa’s earnest plea for trust after the long weeks spent earning it. This is a promise that she can be relied upon - in spite of their history and the betrayal that stains it, and the number of other loving hands that Clarke has had plunge daggers in her spine. This is kindness, and it is dangerous.

Clarke can almost feel her phantom missing fingers tapping against her knee, drumming anxiously in time with her heartbeat. Something wayward pangs in the emptiness of her chest, and she reaches out to take Lexa’s hands as if by reflex. Lexa’s slim digits are warm where they twine with her own - an alien, pleasant burn over the fresh skin of her missing fingers - and Clarke wonders for a moment how something so small can be so terribly frightening.

Opposite her, Lexa smiles - soft, almost wonderstruck - and Clarke’s heart thumps loud enough in her ears to drown out whatever doubt remains.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is longer than half the length of all the other chapters combined. I am _fuming_.
> 
> If you want to see me commentate writing this business check me out on [tumblr](http://caelzorah.tumblr.com/tagged/LEE-VS-MLM), where I regularly expel all the salt in my body.

Lexa brings a new set of crutches four days after Clarke broke the first one. She hands them over with something in her gaze that speaks of self-consciousness, and Nyle excuses himself quietly to fetch breakfast. These are simpler - a long wooden stick, sanded and polished to smooth, with a carved axillary bar at the top - and do not come with handles or pegs for adjustment. Clarke takes them without complaint and Lexa frowns and watches silently when she pushes to her feet and moves to test them.

‘We measured them off of your last set,’ the Commander explains, ‘but I can have them shortened if they’re too tall.’

The wood is harsher against her sides than the leather padding of her old set and she is certain that her wrists will grow to ache from the angle her hands have to twist to in order to grip the strut, but at least she’s mobile. No more being held and being carried and being dragged along the hallways while her skin burns from the body heat. It has been an easy excuse to stay in her bed, and she is as glad as she is loath to give it up.

‘They’ll be more difficult to use without the handles,’ Lexa continues. ‘It was the best I could do on short notice - you’re comfortable though? You’d say if you weren’t.’

‘They’re fine, Lexa.’

The brunette has her hands behind her back, probably to hide her fidgeting, and Clarke hops around the room until she is directly in front of Lexa with her weight resting on the wooden crutches. She rocks forward until Lexa’s breath is skating warm across her lips and waits. After a long, still moment Lexa sighs and the tension leaves her with the exhalation. She ducks forward to cautiously press her forehead to Clarke’s - barely a touch at all. When the blonde is sure her crutch will not skate away across the floor without it she takes her left hand and lightly brushes her fingers through Lexa’s hair. The seconds that they spend standing this way - eyes closed, hardly touching, sharing breath - are warm and seem to last for eons.

‘Sometimes I wish I could touch you,’ Lexa whispers, and pauses to swallow thickly. Clarke feels a tightness grow in her throat, a beat with every syllable. ‘Nothing untoward, just - casual. To hold you when you wake from your nightmares, to take your hand without causing you to startle. I know that it’s hard for you, but I revere every instance you allow. I count the seconds, and want for each one to run infinite. I’ve never felt such greed.’

‘Sometimes I wish you could too,’ Clarke mumbles in return. Lexa’s breath stutters against her skin, and the brunette’s nose bumps lightly against her own, and Clarke feels suddenly and inexplicably tense from her head to her toes. She fumbles to take her fingers back from Lexa’s braids and wraps them tightly around the strut of her crutch. When she rocks back she pretends not to notice the way that Lexa’s body follows.

Even in that moment - that brief glimpse of wanting in accidental motion - Lexa’s hands remain entwined behind her back, and it does not take her more than a second to bite her lip, stop, and come back to herself.

‘You’re not ready,’ she says when her teeth cease with worrying her lips.

Clarke shuffles slightly further back across the concrete, breaking in the crutches, and tries to keep her gaze away from the Commander’s blackened eyes. Some small part of her wants to protest - wants to say “Finn is long behind me”, and “the Mountain doesn’t matter”, and “I could love you - I could, I could, _I could_ ” - but she can’t. There are bigger issues now than betrayal and she cannot pretend that even the _thought_ of contact doesn’t make her stomach roil.

‘I may never be ready,’ she says instead, and turns away to spare herself the sight of Lexa’s doubtless wounded eyes. ‘I shouldn’t ask you to wait.’

‘That is not your choice to make,’ Lexa’s voice quietly calls behind her, as warm as it is small. ‘It’s mine. With or without the touch of your hands, Clarke, you are well worth waiting for. Whatever you want, whenever you’re ready.’

It does not come with an embrace or a kiss to seal it, and Lexa leaves shortly after to deal with the rest of her day - but perhaps that is why it brings a lightness to her bones, a flutter to her stomach and a warmth to her chest. Lexa does not curse her for her feelings, does not profess to make Clarke the centre of her world, does not need her for every waking moment, does not want the blonde to take the weight of responsibility from her straining back and save her soul - she just wants to _be there_.

Clarke feels, for a moment, weightless - and the sensation is foreign to her. She cannot remember the last person to promise her something without draping it as a burden on her shoulders.

Something in her chest burns, and for the first time in a long while it is pleasant.

 

\--

 

When her lunch is brought up Raven comes with it. Nyle abandons his seat at the table where they have been playing card games and withdraws to the small balcony attached to Clarke’s room in order to give them privacy. He is close enough to come running if she shouts and it says everything that Nyle cannot: he does not trust Raven with his Cordes Sang. Clarke cannot blame him for being cautious of what he does not know.

‘Doesn’t go far, does he?’ the mechanic asks while the tower attendants - most of whom Clarke knows by name, now - rest their piled trays at Clarke’s table and leave the room at her nod of dismissal. The brunette drops into Nyle’s vacated chair and picks at the small feast provided.

‘Ice Nation tradition,’ Clarke grumbles in reply. She does not know how else to describe this bond that they share to someone from the sky, someone who has not bathed in the blood of their peers like Clarke has, someone who treasures distance. She doesn’t know how to explain the rest of it - the things that Nyle supplies outside of Cordes Sang - without causing harm. She wants to call him “comrade”, “supplicant”, “guard” - the things that he has chosen. She wants to call him _“friend”_ \- the only friend she has now, if she’s honest.

Clarke is mad, and tired, and out of touch, but she is not stupid: saying these things to Raven will only offend.

‘Your mom said you’re not coming back to Arkadia with us,’ Raven says carefully while she picks at the bread in her hands, ripping it into bite-sized chunks almost absentmindedly. Clarke nods in reply. ‘You’re really going grounder then? Octavia’s gonna be pissed.’

‘Octavia’s going to be pissed no matter what I do,’ Clarke says, pushing up from the chair and maneuvering her crutches back under her arms. ‘Stay or leave. She can handle her own problems.’

‘Even Lincoln’s banishment? He’s not allowed out of Arkadia. Lexa called a kill order on him for treason.’

‘Probably because he _committed_ treason,’ comes Clarke’s dull reply. She takes the long strides across the room to grab her sketchbook from the desk and fumbles through the small tin of charcoal that she and Nyle share. ‘If Octavia wants to petition for that order to be lifted that’s her prerogative. No one’s stopping her.’

‘You’re not going to, like, vie for it yourself? Send us home with a pardon in fancy cursive with a wax seal at the bottom?’ Raven questions, and frowns when Clarke only shrugs around her crutches and hops back to her seat. ‘What happened between you two?’

‘Mount Weather. The twelve days preceding it,’ Clarke explains simply. ‘Doesn’t matter. Whatever life she wanted I failed to give it to her. I’m done with trying.’

‘You’re not the girl I knew four months ago,’ Raven remarks slowly. Her tone is impassive to the point of stoniness, and Clarke assumes it is only so she will not sound sad.

‘No one knew that girl,’ she says and flips to a new page in the leather bound sketch pad. ‘Which is why they’ll all find it so easy to believe when you tell them I murdered Pike’s people in cold blood.’

The words are met with silence, and Clarke fills it by dragging charcoal across the unblemished page. She draws the things she sees nowadays - all the flowers in the gardens and the little birds and bugs that frequent them, Nyle and the number of faces he pulls every day, and Lexa - but she has always been best at sketching from memory, from stories and books and the thoughts that succeeded them. These things decorated her cell walls up in the sky when she drew from dreams; now she draws from nightmares. Clarke outlines a face on the page and pretends that Raven is not staring hard at her from across the table.

‘Why-’ the mechanic starts before pausing to cough harshly, voice sounding tight. When she tries again her tone is freer, but no less wary. ‘Why would I tell them that?’

‘Because you know our people as well as I do, Raven,’ Clarke says. ‘They need there to be a villain. That’s why you came to Polis in the first place.’

‘You’re _not_ a villain.’

‘But I’m not good, either,’ Clarke tells her simply, but with force. ‘Three hundred and seventy suffocated on toxic air in the mountain with a wave of my hand. Three hundred Trigedakru burned in a ring of fire at my word alone. I killed Atom because I couldn’t fix him, and Finn because I couldn’t save him, and I jammed a scalpel into the throat of a Trikru man while he showed me his scars. I’m a killer, first and foremost, and no one will forget that.’ Clarke pauses to swallow whatever emotion the words threaten to drag from her chest before she continues. ‘And that is why when you tell them I am a monster - a savage turned rabid in the woods - and I killed Pike’s men for fun, or for duty, or for the sake of filling a craving, they’ll believe you.’

‘I won’t lie for you,’ Raven swears grimly. ‘Not like that.’

‘Then lie for Monty,’ Clarke offers smartly. ‘So that he never has to know what his mother did. So he never has to feel that shame, or remember her wrongly, or dream of her smile turning bloody. So he never has to convince himself, or anyone around him, that I was right - that they all should have died, that they were worse than I am. So he never has to worry that he might turn out like her.’

It stops Raven in her tracks, and Clarke pretends not to notice the way that the mechanic slows her chewing and swallows with a grimace as though the bread has turned to ash in her mouth. There is silence for a while - nothing other than the sound of Clarke’s charcoal skating across the page.

‘What if they don’t believe that?’ the mechanic hazards eventually - reluctantly.

‘They must,’ Clarke says. ‘You have to convince them. Shouldn’t be hard - even Bellamy had so much trouble letting go of the image he had of Pike, and he was supposed to know me best of all. Easier to make a monster out of me than their friends and family and the faces they passed in the hallways up there. There’s only one of me, after all.’

She pauses at the sound of footsteps from outside and throws a wan smile to Nyle when he ducks back in the room to look for food. The imposing Azgeda man gives an apologetic shrug and is quick to pick a plate up from the table and pile it with whatever he has chosen from the kitchen’s offerings, but he pauses at Clarke’s side to look at her sketch.

Calloused fingers reach out to touch reverently at the page and Clarke keeps her eyes focussed on the texture of the parchment so she will not have to see the slow bob of his throat. He makes a short noise that Clarke translates from familiarity alone to mean “more square” as he taps at the charcoal lines of the figure’s jaw; they both pretend his hand doesn’t shake at all.

Clarke nods at the suggestion and tips her head to knock affectionately at his bicep before he takes his leave, retreating back into the cooler outside air.

‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ she mutters when he’s gone and her hand has moved to correct her mistake, and the words make her chuckle even as her stomach lurches.

‘He can’t talk, can he?’ Raven asks, but it’s not really a question. Clarke is sure the mechanic doesn’t know enough about clan culture to identify him from the tattoos alone, but his speechlessness is obviously telling. She nods in reply. ‘He’s one of the prisoners - his tongue... He was there with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you didn’t do it alone,’ Raven reasons. ‘You don’t have to be the only one.’

‘I do,’ Clarke says resolutely, dropping her charcoal on the table ahead of her and using the pads of her fingers to smudge the shade across the page. ‘Not for him, or even for me - but for you, Raven. You and everyone else in Arkadia who will die if you go looking for vengeance where it shouldn’t be found.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You came here with blame intended - Bellamy spewed it out as soon as the throne room doors were closed,’ the blonde explains. ‘Lexa has made mistakes. Persecute her for them if you will, but don’t let anyone make up crimes to pin to her name - or to her people. No grounder can be attached to the slaughter - it will only breed fear. Then hate. Then war. And Arkadia will not survive a war, no matter how many bullets they have or how many volts run through the perimeter fence.’

Raven is silent for an extended, aching moment before she shifts in her chair. She leans back, arms crossing stiffly over her chest as she scowls.

‘Always playing politics, Clarke,’ she says. ‘It’s not fair on you.’

‘Not at all. But it _is_ simple,’ Clarke tells her. She turns the paper in her hands and tosses it down on the table, watching it skid to a rest in front of her friend. ‘Pike made his choice, and I made mine. And no one else should have to suffer for that.’

Raven has never met Hannah Green, but the sight of her smiling, motherly face in smooth charcoal is enough to still her tongue.

When they have eaten their fill and she is sure the topic of conversation has truly come to rest Clarke pushes back to her feet, grabs her crutches and calls for Nyle. Raven stands at the commotion - less awkward than Clarke and far more cautious - but does not seem displeased when she is led out of the room and down to the tower gardens. Nyle accompanies them silently as Clarke leads the way - hopping almost expertly along the winding path on her wooden crutches and ignoring the way that they chafe at her sides.

‘You really know your way around here,’ Raven says. She sounds thoughtful and when Clarke glances her way it is to note a slight quirk at her lips; whether this hints at a smile or a frown is a mystery.

‘Not really,’ Clarke idly replies. ‘Some parts of the tower, and the gardens, yeah - Nyle and I spend most afternoons down here now - but I haven’t seen any of the rest of the city. Outside of the tower grounds Polis is a mystery to me.’

The words are a turning point: a frown solidifies.

‘Why?’

‘I can leave,’ Clarke clarifies quickly - better to bust that theory before it really takes root. Raven’s shoulders ease even as she says the words. ‘I haven’t needed to. And it wouldn’t have been smart - I haven’t really been capable of looking after myself recently.’

‘Because of the leg?’ Raven asks flatly, and Clarke shakes her head and takes a few more practiced strides down the path until they come upon one of the benches she and Nyle frequent.

‘The crutches don’t bother me - now, anyway,’ she says as she turns herself around and takes a seat. ‘It’s the other parts of the recovery: the malnutrition, the blood loss, the exhaustion. I spent days in bed after Nyle brought me here, delirious, fighting off infection - and more after that trying to get enough energy into my body just to stand up. Nyle will guard me if I go out into the city, no doubt about it - but even the _thought_ of going out there’s still too exhausting for me most days.’

‘As long as you’re not _trapped_ here,’ Raven says, and it’s possible that what Clarke feels on her own lips is a smile.

‘Like I’d let myself be,’ she scoffs. ‘I’ll see the streets eventually - when the crutches stop making my chest hurt and I’m not so worried about word getting around. “Wanheda” shacking up in Polis? There’d be a riot. High tensions with the Ice Nation, I’m told.’

‘You really can’t leave the politics behind, can you?’

‘Short of dying or leaving the east coast? Nope. Seems I’m stuck with ‘em.’

Raven frowns but doesn’t argue - just as Clarke expects.

 

\--

 

Clarke takes dinner in the main hall for the first time since the Arkadians arrived. Nyle breezes ahead of her to scope out the room while Lexa keeps a steady pace at Clarke’s side - the same space she’s inhabited since her last meeting of the day finished two hours earlier. The table is fuller than usual, edged with the familiar faces of Lexa’s advisors as well as the three Skaikru visitors.

Hooking her crutch around the leg of her chair to pull it out has become almost second nature by now, and Clarke proceeds to do so before her mother can stand from her seat with all her good intentions to fuss and coddle and make Clarke seem a child. She pretends not to notice the way that Bellamy avoids her gaze, or how Abby’s eye follow her every motion in silent plea. Instead she gives Raven a nod - kind enough after their mostly pleasant day together - and calls a greeting to the members of Lexa’s staff that she has come to know by name: Mika, Ajax, Rohan, Magnus. They are all older than her - Magnus by a year, Mika by thirty, the others somewhere in between. They make up only half of Lexa’s council, and while Clarke knows they argue with Lexa daily about Polis, and politics, and where Wanheda fits into that picture, they have never been anything less than respectful to Clarke herself. Kind, even.

Magnus particularly - along with his twin sister, Britt, who works in the tower kitchens - is perhaps as close to a friend as Clarke has had since hitting the ground, Nyle aside. He is a new age politician, interested in her knowledge of healing and of technologies beyond what the Trigedakru have always used, prone to challenging tradition, and Clarke knows that this is where his fascination with her stems. But his affection - his grin rather than the reserved smile he gave those first weeks when Clarke was gaunt and sick at the table, his queries after her wellbeing, his promises to bring her new paints from the Mountain Clan after the winter trade - has been earned.

He waves at her across the table, more jovial than necessary and unbothered by the way that Mika sighs and frowns beside him. Rohan calls a diplomatic hello in the midst of whatever conversation he is holding with Bellamy, and Ajax - late in his forties and heavily scarred across his face and his hands, tactically minded and as formal in peacetime as she is told he is in war - merely nods at her, dark eyes assessing. There is no judgement in his gaze and it is, as ever, a comfort. Her absence these last few nights has been noted - but not as a point of gossip.

Ajax is quiet, and hardened, but there is something warm in his eyes that almost seems to say he’s happy to see her back - and, more so, to see her _well_ \- and this strikes her just as keenly as Magnus’s brilliant grin and Mika’s idle wave.  

What an odd feeling it is to have simply been missed.

The mood around the table is more pleasant than Clarke initially expects, given its patrons. Nyle tests a cup of ale before passing it to Clarke with permission to drink, silent as ever, and Magnus chatters to her across the table about one of his friends in the city’s healing ward and the new antibiotic they’ve concocted made of garlic, onion, wine and the bile of livestock. It is as disgusting as it is fascinating, and from the way that Abby quietens and turns her head to the conversation Clarke thinks it is an opinion that they share.

‘Estera - one of the _fisas_ who healed you when you arrived - has been asking after you,’ Magnus continues amicably when he is done describing the remedy. The name is vaguely familiar and Clarke attributes it to a woman with graying hair and a crooked nose, badly set after an old break - one of her most vocal healers from the time of her delirium.

‘Why? There’s nothing left for her to fix of me?’ Clarke replies, confused, and Magnus smiles brightly and shakes his head.

‘Old soul. Needs to know every patient,’ he says. ‘And I think she wants to ask you about Skaikru remedies. Perhaps work with you for a time, study your healing practices. Techniques, technology -’

‘All the same things _you_ want to ask me about?’ Clarke asks.

Magnus’s smile is guilty but without regret, and when he laughs and says ‘Ah, Clarke, but imagine all the things that we could _learn_ ,’ Clarke feels that he does not mean the Trikru, or the Polis healers, or even himself - or rather, he doesn’t mean _just_ them. He means for Clarke to learn as well. The thought is almost gratifying.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she says through pursed lips.

The conversation is stalled when the doors to the hall open and the tower staff funnel in with steaming plates and move to place them at each setting. Clarke finds a ceramic dish placed ahead of her teeming with vegetable ragout. The meal is a staple for her now - padded out with beans and lentils to substitute the meat she cannot stomach and a few slices of Britt’s famous bread (“family recipe: heavy, and just a little bit sour”) - though there are variations. One of the cooks likes to serve stews of thick, spiced curries embellished with a paste of crushed nuts; another swears by soup, broth light on the tongue and hearty to the stomach; the most memorable so far has been rice with a sauce that was hot to taste and a mix of mushrooms and carrots and onions and sprouts that left her satisfied and red-faced from the spice.

There has not been a speck of meat on Clarke’s plate since the time she left to empty her stomach at the taste of it - nor on Nyle’s since it was noted he tended to eat around it - and though the scent of roasted boar is evident in the room from the plates of other patrons it is not enough to make Clarke’s stomach roll.

Pike’s men didn’t always cook, after all - especially as the weeks went on and their madness grew apparent. Perhaps the trigger is simply not as strong.

(Perhaps she’s getting over it.)

These meals are prepared separately to be kept completely free of their anathema - Clarke knows this from speaking with Magnus and Britt, and lurking in the kitchens for honey cakes once or twice on the way back from walking - and while she initially felt guilt for causing trouble, now it only warms Clarke’s heart. It is an unspoken kindness of Lexa’s and of the staff of the tower, though she’s sure it’s gained more weight since her confession, and she clutches more tightly to the foreign affection every day.

Her mother misses this memo.

‘You’ve told me my daughter is not a prisoner here, yet you’re feeding her a prisoner’s rations.’

The fork in Clarke’s hand jams loudly into the tabletop beside her bowl and Nyle shifts slightly in his chair beside her. There is silence, and somewhere beneath her suddenly simmering anger Clarke hopes with all sincerity that her mother has made a good enough impression on the council members in the last few days to make up for the offence that she is currently causing.

‘No one ever pass that on to Britt,’ Magnus says quietly, though with good humour. ‘She’d go rabid.’

‘The food is fine,’ Clarke grumbles between gritted teeth, glaring darkly at her mother across the table and willing her to shut her mouth. ‘Brilliant, even. And a damn sight better than the protein bars that made up most of our diet on the Ark.’

‘Clarke, you’re missing half your meal,’ her mother insists, chiding. Clarke feels her mother's tone grate at the back of her skull like Hannah’s greedy fingers in her nightmares. ‘There are nutrients, proteins, iron - things you won’t get without meat. You’re still ill and if they don’t feed you properly you won’t -’

‘I’m not _lacking_. My meal plan was carefully constructed by some of the finest cooks in Polis,’ Clarke tells her promptly. ‘It is a kindness - _not_ a punishment.’

‘To cut out such a vital part of your nutritional regimen is -’

‘This was not a choice,’ Lexa interrupts, wooden in tone and stiff in her chair. The knife in her hand is gouging into the centre of her plate with the force of her grip and for a moment Clarke considers reaching out to calm her. She wonders if she could stomach the touch. ‘There are things that Clarke cannot do and we accommodate that.’

Lexa says the words as though they are law; from her lips they might as well be.

‘I’m not being starved,’ Clarke reinforces simply. ‘So stop looking for problems where there are none, and shut up and eat your food.’

For a short while Abby appears to listen, seemingly cowed, and Clarke makes it through one slice of bread and half of her bowl before anything more is said. The silence is pressing, marked by Lexa’s seething stillness and the judgemental air of her council members - great politicians, terrible dinner guests - and Clarke wishes they would go back to speaking of trivial things.

‘I just don’t get why -’ Abby starts suddenly, and Clarke wishes abruptly for oppressive silence.

‘If you have to ask then you haven’t been paying attention,’ Lexa says, every syllable disapproving.

Clarke stares at her and thinks: _but you never had to ask at all_.

Lexa, who knew nothing of Pike and his men or the things that they did - the things that Clarke lived through in those three weeks that felt like months, years, centuries - saw Clarke sick and instead of questioning _why_ asked _how she could help_. Lexa, who found Clarke hurt and adrift in the wake of war and set about trying to give her a future instead of making her relive the past.

She never asked - not even after Clarke had told the truth.

Clarke wonders how many Trigedakru warriors have come home injured and ill, and bereft of purpose; have lost their limbs, and their voices, and their taste for food alongside their minds; how many Lexa’s staff have been charged with feeding and clothing and slowly trying to heal; how many like Nyle have been coaxed back to the training grounds to take up arms and fight again; how many like Clarke have been bathed and loved and retaught how to breathe.

She does not wonder how many people Lexa has laid beside through daydreams and night terrors, promised joy and shown affection: it has always been clear that these things are only for Clarke.

Lexa’s culture is one that acknowledges sacrifice - _appreciates_ it - and Clarke feels warmth swell in her chest when she realises that she has been made a part of that.

‘She goes missing for three months and then we find her fucked up and apparently _shacked_ up with _you_ , Commander,’ Bellamy pipes up. Clockwork. Never could keep his mouth shut when he was out of control of a situation. ‘I think we have the right to ask questions.’

‘You do not,’ Lexa replies promptly, steel in her tone.

For anyone else - anyone with a lick of sense or _respect_ in their body - that would be enough. But it is not enough for Bellamy, who must know all things at all times; who holds his grudges in the very marrow of his bones; who trusts no one but himself to know what’s best. Clarke knows that no amount of power, no command from the Heda of the twelve clans or his Chancellor herself - not that Abby appears to have any intention of doing anything other than backing him quietly - will stop Bellamy from going after what he wants.

The sound of her fork clattering to the table is loud in the midst of Bellamy and Lexa’s glaring match and it earns her the gaze of all guests at the Heda’s table. Clarke stares at her shaking hand - four fingers and one thumb, perfect and unscarred and so unlike it’s pair - and feels her stomach lurch at the words bubbling like bile up her throat.

‘You have _no_ right, but I’ll clarify since you want it so badly,’ she says and pushes her still half-full bowl away from her across the tabletop. Her appetite deserts her. ‘Imagine, for a moment, that you’re kneeling in a tent that smells of blood and shit, and in front of you someone that you knew in your childhood rips through a man’s arm with a rusted saw. The guy screams until he passes out and then all you can hear is the squelch of his flesh and the scrape of metal on bone. Eventually the limb disconnects, and you can’t help but consider it a relief.’

Beside her Nyle has become a statue, hardly even moving with the sway of his breath. Across the table Raven has paused in her meal and the dark tan of her skin gains a more uncomfortable gray tint with every syllable. She nudges her own plate away with a frown, and Clarke continues.

‘The stump gets stitched up, but not well. You’d suggest a better technique, but honestly you want the guy to just - bleed out. Die. You won’t have to hear him scream again. He won’t have to,’ she says. She recites it almost absently, as though it is fiction - as though it isn’t real, and she doesn’t feel it and relive it in every waking moment and every sleeping one. She watches all of the fight go out of Bellamy’s gaze and feels her own skin crawl. ‘Maybe they make you watch as they cut up the meat. Maybe they just tear it straight from the bone with their teeth. Maybe they put it over the fire, and the scent of cooking flesh comes into your tent and clings right to you along with the woodsmoke. You feel your stomach rumbling and you don’t know if it’s because it’s made you sick or because it’s made you hungry.’

The way that Bellamy swallows is obvious: slow and uncomfortable, accompanied by the slow trickle of sweat on his brow. Perhaps he will be ill from the thought alone and his weak stomach will quieten him for the rest of his stay in whatever way that a crutch to the head could not.

‘You see Monty’s eyes in a woman who laughs in your ear as she cuts off your fingers. She rips into them raw and seems so, so satisfied with every bite,’ Clarke says. ‘You learn what human brains look like, and how easily they pull apart. Pike tells you they’re a delicacy. When you sleep - _if_ you do - a man wakes you to strip the skin from your body. He slurps it down in long strands and touches your face like you’re holy.’

She feels the motion of Nyle’s hands withdrawing from the tabletop beside her more than she sees it. Even with her eyes focussed so keenly on Bellamy it is easy to note the way that Lexa’s knuckles have gone bone white with the grip she’s exerting on her knife and fork and the way her chest lurches with every breath, affected. Clarke is too in tune with the both of them now to miss these things at all, and it spawns some kind of crawling thing in the pit of her roiling stomach that feels a lot like guilt.

This hurts them, and she is sorry for that - but this is also the only way that she can make the Skaikru stop. They have never valued privacy before and they will not start now.

‘Imagine it,’ she forces on, ‘and then tell me what you would feel when you cut into the boar on your plate. How would it taste on your tongue? Would the texture make you gag? Would you swallow it?’

Clarke wonders if he will retch in front of her now - if _she_ will retch later tonight when the stars are shining and the terrors run rampant in her mind.

‘Do you ever wonder what your own flesh tastes like, Bellamy?’ she asks slowly. Her tone is quieter now but no less piercing, and she imagines her words hooking into his skin and stitching themselves into all the same spaces that the Flayer took from her. ‘Because I do.’

Silence follows. Clarke stares across the table at her former co-leader until he cringes away like a wounded animal, but even then the tension doesn’t break. Beside her, Lexa is stiff and fuming, teeth clenched behind her cheeks and her eyes burning, but there is no just target for her rage and the Commander is forced to stew in it. Clarke wants to calm her but she is burning in her every pore - bubbling uncomfortably with her own anger and the memory of the Flayer’s hands, and his knife, and the way her skin disappeared between his greedy lips - and without the comfort of touch she doesn’t know how to accomplish such a thing.

‘Well,’ Magnus interjects after a long, tense minute. He follows the exclamation with the scraping sound of his plate across the wooden table as he pushes it away from him. ‘I, for one, am very glad that honey cakes remain strictly vegetarian and am going down to the kitchens to fetch some. And possibly to tell my sister how thankful I am that she’s a perfectly functional member of society.’

‘Have her send some up to my room later,’ Clarke tells him as he stands from the table. She appreciates his humour, but her own words have forced a stone in her chest that makes it hard to smile. He nods as though he understands and stands from the table to make for the door.

‘Of course. Anything to wash the taste out,’ he says, and throws a final ‘Consider the _fisa_ ’s offer, Clarke!’ over his shoulder before he leaves.

The tension doesn’t leave with Magnus but he provides enough of a cue for the other advisors to do what they do best: ignore it and barrel on. Mika spears into a potato on her plate and pops it in her mouth with total disregard; Ajax lifts his cup as if to clash it with another in celebration and tips the contents down his throat without a second thought; Rohan takes the quiet moment to explain to his colleagues how the new irrigation proposal from one of the Trikru villages to the North would benefit their city.

These things are so frighteningly normal for them all, and it is clearer now more than ever: Clarke’s trauma is not an issue for these people, or a talking point, or an event that they are owed. Her outbursts do not offend them; she is well within rights to feel, and to speak of those feelings without feeling like a burden, like a bother, like she is voicing taboos and speaking out of turn. They are not cowed because they do not need to be.

Nyle shifts awkwardly in his chair and Clarke turns to take in his tense shoulders, the furrow of his brow, and the agitated pace of his breathing.

‘What do you need?’ she asks quietly. His hand drops to the knife at his belt, and Clarke understands immediately. He wants to fight - to pump blood to every intact limb and prove how _alive_ he is, how strong he is without ropes around his wrists. Would that she could do the same. ‘I’ll be fine for a few hours. Get it out of your system. Lexa will go with you.’

He freezes and frowns as if to protest but it is Lexa, seated to Clarke’s other side and far too attentive, who gives voice to an argument. Her tone is wooden with a crackle of fiery rage - all the warning of a signal fire.

‘Clarke.’

‘Lexa.’

There are several long seconds following where they stare at each other, equally defiant, and then the Commander lets a glimmer of her concern shine through.

‘We’ve been with you since you woke,’ she says softly, and it is clear that she doesn’t mean since only this morning. Clarke tilts her head in answer.

‘I’ll be fine for an hour or two while you bash heads in the fighting pits,’ Clarke says. ‘I can handle bathing and changing for bed on my own. I don’t need help for that anymore.’

There are other things she wants to say: “Nyle should not be alone”, and “Just _do this_ for me” key amongst them. But the most overwhelming thought - the part she hopes that Lexa understands without it being spoken, without Clarke exposing it in front of the table guests, without being poked and prodded and forced into action - is: _you need it as much as Nyle does._

There is hesitation - Lexa’s boiling blood at war with her bleeding heart, it seems - before she seems to think better of it and stands with a short nod. Clarke isn’t sure what sways her - Nyle’s stillness around the agony he does so well to hide; Clarke’s clarity in spite of her confession, the sudden strength in exhausted bones; the rage that Lexa is still so clearly feeling, rampant in every capillary, every artery, every vein.

‘Don’t eat all the honey cakes before you go to bed. You know Britt will make you too many,’ Lexa says stiffly, though not without affection. It is enough to spur the hint of a smile to Clarke’s lips as the Commander steps past her and off towards the door. _‘Miya,_ Nyle.’

The Azgeda warrior waits another moment until Clarke gives him a last reassuring nod before standing from his own chair and moving to follow. Clarke is left alone at the table with the councillors chattering away among themselves and the estranged members of the Skaikru seated uncomfortably across from her.

Later - of this she is sure - Nyle and Lexa will skulk back to her with their bodies bruised and their limbs tired, freshly washed and clean of dirt, and as clear of the anguish and rage that her open mouth has twisted beneath their skin as they can possibly be. Mostly she is glad for this - the lightness that they will find in physical exertion, in moving and heaving and sweating out their pain - and that they can do this together.

(Maybe somewhere inside she is envious, hurt that she will never share in the practice. As Lexa said herself: there are some things that Clarke can no longer do.)

She hopes they come back smiling.

 

\--

 

Clarke spends a long time floating in the bathwater just staring at the cracks in the ceiling. The soft lapping sound of water on tile echoes back to her in the dim room every time she moves, but otherwise there is silence.

It’s odd not to have Nyle seated on the bench in the corner with a book in his hands humming his feelings with every turn of the page, or Lexa waiting with a towel in her hands and a flush on her cheeks, mumbling about clan politics with her gaze fixed on anything else. It’s almost easy to believe that there is nothing outside of herself, of this room and the water that creeps slowly into her ear canals until the quiet world feels muffled, somehow, and she starts to feel imbalanced.

How strange it is to be alone after all these weeks of company, both good and bad. The solitude is almost calming - or so it seems for a time while she lays weightless in the water, relishing in the fact that here her bum leg is no more dead weight than any of the rest of her. Eventually though, the echoing silence seems to coil around her lungs and start to tighten, and she struggles to pull herself up onto the tile to towel herself off and dress. The whole process is far harder without helping hands, but there is a sure satisfaction that comes from being able to do it herself.

There is a body by her bedroom door by the time Clarke gets there but it is neither of the ones she is wanting. Nonetheless, she affords Raven an idle smile on approach and welcomes her in.

‘Fancy nightgown,’ the mechanic says while Clarke hops across the room on her crutches to drop her day clothes, bundled up in her towel, in the washing basket that the tower staff long since placed in the corner. ‘New clothes, huge bed - holy shit they really did send up a whole plate of little cakes.’

Clarke snorts and moves towards the table to drop into the same seat she had at lunchtime and take a cake from the plate on the table. It’s still slightly warm and it crumbles when she bites into it.

‘I’d stay just for the food, honestly,’ she says between bites and gestures for Raven to take one when she finds dark eyes wanting.

Once, months ago now, she watched Jasper tuck into a piece of chocolate cake and moan happily at the taste and it had made her sick to her stomach. Raven does the same now - but without the lies, the locked doors and ulterior motives - and Clarke feels nothing but warmth because of it.

‘They’re really good to you here, aren’t they?’ Raven asks. Clarke doesn’t answer, doesn’t need to - it’s pretty damned obvious. ‘We’re going back to Arkadia in the morning. Do you think Lexa would mind if I came back to visit sometime though?’

‘I think she’d be glad,’ Clarke says lightly. ‘Someone from the Skaikru coming here with a genuine interest in exploring the culture and bridging the gap? She’d build you a fucking temple.’

‘Well - yes, all that I guess, and I’m keen to learn more about the technology they use in the city, Clarke, you’ve got to see it,’ Raven rambles brightly. ‘There’s so much I could fix - and so much I could _learn_. But I actually meant to come back and see _you_.’

 _She might build you a temple for that too_ , Clarke thinks, but the word that comes out is: ‘Why?’

‘Because you’re my friend. Duh.’ To her credit Raven manages to keep any trace of hurt at Clarke’s incredulity out of her tone. Still, she seems more thoughtful when she continues. And emotive - because, god, clearly Clarke needs another one of _those_ conversations today. ‘Or you’re gonna be. I’m over what happened with Finn, and I’m handling what happened _to_ him - and it wasn’t your fault, Clarke. I shouldn’t have tried to make you feel like it was.’

‘You were hurting,’ Clarke says, like that makes it okay.

‘So were you,’ Raven replies, because it doesn’t. Clarke stuffs another honey cake in her mouth and hopes that Raven will change the topic while she chews on it. ‘Your mom told me the diagnosis - with your leg? Rough shit. I guess we kind of match now.’

‘Almost,’ Clarke says around cake crumbs, and swallows. She’s not so sure this subject is any better. ‘Nifty brace aside.’

‘I could make you one,’ Raven offers. ‘If your mom gave me all the right information and I do a bit of research I could probably come up with something functional.’

Clarke shakes her head as a negative before Raven even finishes speaking.

‘Short of some pretty advanced robotics it wouldn’t work,’ she says. ‘You’d have to simulate muscle motions and factor in the hip without impeding other functions, and still keep it lightweight enough to lift, and… It just - wouldn’t work. I’ll get some movement back from physical therapy but I’m going to be using crutches for the rest of my life.’ Raven scowls, and Clarke shrugs at the upset. ‘There are worse things.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘What?’

 _‘That_. “There are worse things” - like someone else’s crappy hand in life somehow makes yours less valid,’ Raven spits. ‘Like it doesn’t fucking _bother_ you that you’re disabled - ‘cause you’re _disabled_ , Clarke. It’s allowed to bother you.’

‘I’m well aware of how inconvenient it is, thank you.’

‘Inconv- for fuck’s sake, Clarke! You have to drag your own damned leg around like it’s a fucking sandbag and it’s just “inconvenient”? A shitty, horrid, terrible thing happened to you and you’re - you’re just -’

Clarke flounders in the face of her rage.

‘I tend not to think about it,’ she says, eyeing Raven warily. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘I want you to -’ Raven cuts herself off with the force of her own flailing hands, looking for the words and trying to get the message across without them. ‘I want you to scream. I want you to screech and cry and rage at me, and tell me how it’s ruining your life and how fucked up it is that you have to work everything around it now. I want you to yell at anyone who looks at you the wrong fucking way because they think you’re weak and you need help with everything you do. I want you to be _angry_ , Clarke.’

‘You think I’m not?’ Clarke asks, incredulous. The tightness in her chest from her lonely bath has eased but now there is a burn in her throat instead. She’s not sure which is less comfortable. ‘I _am_ angry, Raven. I’m fucking furious. I’m seething _all the time_. It never stops.’

Raven seems taken aback by the admittance - or perhaps by the growing ire in Clarke’s tone. Semantics.

‘There are things that we are never meant to see and I see them every time I blink, every time I close my eyes,’ Clarke explains. ‘I can’t sleep because I have nightmares. I can’t eat because it makes me sick to even smell food half the time. I heard one of the tower staff laughing in the hallway once and I felt like I was suffocating because she sounded like Hannah - manic, out of her fucking mind. I can’t-’

She chokes off for a moment, the tension in her neck constricting her voice, choking on a wayward fleck of her own saliva. Her head is pounding and her eyes are burning and she wishes she could stand and run, whip out a sword and whack her enemies into submission like everyone else, sweat the darkness out through her pores. She can’t; she never will.

‘It took days for my clothes to feel fine on my skin again, and I can’t _touch_ anyone anymore,’ she says, and thinks of Lexa. ‘Because every time - _every_ time - no matter who it is or _how_ it is, I think of Pike’s hands on my shoulders shoving me through the woods, and Hannah’s knife cutting through my bones. I think of that man scraping his fingertips across my skin, studying me like a fucking painting until he found the perfect part to flay and I - I killed him but it’s like he’s still here and he’s still doing it, and I want to crawl out of my own body, Raven. I want to burn him off - I want to die.’

Raven is paler than Clarke has ever seen her, sinking down into her chair, but it is not enough - not even a fraction of what Clarke wants her, wants everyone outside of herself, to feel. Her eyes burn and her cheeks are wet and her words stick in her throat and the back of her nose.

‘And sometimes I think I’m fine, and I’m getting there, and it’s gonna be better, and then I’ll remember - Pike saying things, speaking to me, and the way I fought him at first,’ she says, ‘until I got weak, and hungry, and tired, and scared, and then he started to make sense. I started to think “maybe I could do it, maybe I could be like him, maybe I already am”. He ate those people. I shared that fucking tent with Erik for nine _days_ , and Pike cut him up and brought me a bowl of stew and I still thought - I _still_ thought, just for a second “I could do it, it’ll be easy, no one will ever have to know”. _I_ thought that. _Me_. And I can’t stop wondering how many times they all looked at their dead and thought the exact same thing before they just fucking _did_ it. I can’t stop thinking I would too.’

The nightgown Lexa gifted her is silky in texture but when she presses it against the raw skin in the divot of her thigh where the muscle used to be it feels as coarse as sand. Clarke makes sure that the fabric sits tight against the scar so that Raven can see: there is no fixing this.

‘Pike took so much from me and I’m furious, Raven, but I can’t change anything. I can’t get those things back,’ Clarke says. ‘So maybe, since this is just the way I am now and it is never going to change - maybe I don’t _want_ to be angry about it. Not when it’s so _fucking_ exhausting.’

Raven doesn’t seem to know what to say, and Clarke has absolutely no problem with that at all; she sniffs to stem her suddenly running nose and tries to calm her heaving chest in the silence. There are questions somewhere in the mess of her mind that she desperately wants answered but the mechanic is no more likely to be able to than she is; they are both too young, too new to their trials and their traumas. Maybe one day when they’re older and they’ve both found their ways Clarke will _know_ , and will sit with some other young broken thing and say “this is how you handle it” with experience to back the words.

Maybe one day, but not this one - not while Lexa’s kindness is the only breath of fresh air she has amidst her body’s determination to asphyxiate; not while her sheets strangle her in the dark but always seem a sanctuary in the daylight; not while even waking in the morning is a blow.

‘You know,’ Raven says after a few long moments have passed and she has digested Clarke’s monologue. The tone is far more casual than Clarke expects considering what has been said. ‘That, uh - that sounds like the kind of stuff that you talk to your friends about.’

‘You’re fishing for it, aren’t you,’ Clarke comments dryly. The humour is not intended but it slinks its way into her words anyway.

‘Nah, I’m bad at fishing. Like, really bad - you haven’t seen it,’ Raven says with a hint of a smile. ‘But you know you can - I mean I don’t really know what to say back at _all_ , because shit, Clarke, who does? - but you can talk to me about -’ Her hands wave vaguely in Clarke’s general direction. ‘- all this. Honestly. ‘Cause you’ve gotta talk about it.’

‘Nyle can’t,’ Clarke mumbles and earns a pained frown for it. ‘He can’t talk about it. Why should I?’

‘Because you can,’ Raven insists simply. _‘Because_ he can’t, and maybe that means you have to speak up for the both of you. Because I asked about your leg and you imploded, and no one should have to carry that much pain on their own, Clarke - not you, and not him, no matter how it’s seemed so far.’

While Clarke abstains from replying Raven seems appeased enough by the thoughtfulness in her expression to let the topic go. Clarke grabs her crutches and pushes out of her chair before she hops across the room to the chest of drawers that holds her clothes, spare furs for the bed and other knick knacks.

‘It’s a twenty minute walk to the river from the city gates. Lexa said it’s a popular place for fishing,’ she says as she plucks a handkerchief from the drawer and goes about wiping her face clean. ‘You’ll have to show me how bad you are next time you visit.’

‘Sure, Clarke,’ Raven says softly, and when Clarke turns back to face her she finds a small, affectionate smile on the mechanic’s face. ‘So long as we do something equally embarrassing for you as well.’

It isn’t long after this - the promise of some kind of friendship between them in the future, of welcome visits and quality time - that Raven bids her goodnight and moves to leave. Lexa is waiting on the other side of the door as Raven opens it to exit, and the two women stare at each other warily as they essentially switch places. The door closes again, and it is just Clarke and Lexa with a half dozen candles to light the space around them.

Lexa’s hair is loose around her shoulders and is still damp from her bath, but not near as much as Clarke knows it should be. A dark bruise is starting to show on Lexa’s brow, and her lip is split - though the bleeding has long since stopped. Her expression is cautious with a low hint of guilt.

‘How long were you listening?’ Clarke asks calmly.

‘Long enough,’ Lexa replies sadly. ‘I shouldn’t have.’

‘You wanted to know,’ Clarke says with a shrug and focuses on hopping over to her bed.

‘But if you’d wanted me to you’d have told me yourself.’

‘If Raven didn’t push I probably wouldn’t’ve told anyone,’ Clarke says with a small shake of her head, easing down to take a seat on the edge of the mattress and reaching over to drop her crutches against the wall at her bedside. ‘It’s easier not to.’

‘Maybe that’s why you should,’ Lexa offers tenderly from where she is still standing by the door, hands clasped behind her back and her shoulders hunched beneath the thin straps of her nightdress. With all the distance between them she seems incredibly small. ‘...Should I have pushed you?’

‘No. You gave me time. I needed that,’ Clarke says without hesitation. ‘Come here.’

Lexa takes a half step backwards instead.

‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,’ she offers quietly, gaze on the floor.

‘Come _here_ ,’ she repeats, less of a question now. She is tired, and aching, and hollow down to her bones, and it has been too long of a day for her racing heart; she doesn’t have it in her to handle this new insecurity with any finesse.

There is a moment of hesitation, of Lexa bodily swaying with the strength of her own indecision, before Clarke’s order pulls her forward and across the room. She comes to a stop on the rug in front of Clarke, perhaps two feet between them. Clarke looks up at her with tired eyes.

‘Where’s Nyle?’

‘Out,’ Lexa says cautiously. ‘He broke one of Ryder’s ribs while they were sparring. Ryder offered to take him out for a drink as a reward after the _fisa_ checked it over.’

‘A _reward_?’

‘Your safety is important,’ Lexa says stiffly. ‘Which means that Nyle - and his training - is important. He’s improving, and Ryder acknowledges that.’

Clarke nods.

‘And are you hurt? Beyond the obvious?’ she asks with a pointed look at the dark slice through Lexa’s lip where the red of her blood is turning dark as it scabs.

‘No,’ Lexa says, then gives it thought. ‘Maybe some bruises. I was careless.’

‘Because you were upset?’

Lexa’s nod is terse, and it takes a long moment before she seems to muster up the courage - or the will - to expand upon it.

‘The things that happened to you were - these terrible, horrible things - and I didn’t _know_ , Clarke, I just thought it was - war, torture, and -’ she stops, and heaves a rasping breath, and Clarke imagines that Lexa’s hands are twisting behind her back along with her anxious words. ‘- those things are terrible too, I know, but _this_ \- this is just…’

‘Lexa,’ Clarke calls softly, ‘I’m right here. I survived it.’

‘You shouldn’t have _had_ to,’ Lexa says, vehement. ‘You should never have been in that position. And I would - I’d kill them for ever laying a hand on you, for what they took from you, but they’re already gone and I’m - I feel, sometimes, so -’

She breaks off with a wounded noise and Clarke reaches out to grab at the soft cotton of her nightdress and pull her in. Lexa stumbles at the unexpected tug, legs collapsing awkwardly beneath her own weight, and when Clarke makes no motion to right her she sinks fully to her knees. Her hands end up in front of her, pressed into the mattress on either side of Clarke, hooked over the top of the blonde’s leg, desperately trying to hold her up just enough to avoid contact.

‘Clarke,’ Lexa protests, because her sides are pressing lightly to the insides of Clarke’s thighs with only the thin material of their nightclothes caught between them. She tries to shift back, and Clarke lifts a hand to card her fingers through brunette tresses.

‘Stop. ‘I’d tell you if I were uncomfortable,’ she says firmly. It is enough to get Lexa to settle. ‘You’re not useless,’ Clarke insists, because she’s sure that’s what Lexa was trying to say. ‘Never think that.’

Green eyes look up at her, reverent, and Clarke’s stomach flutters at the sight - Lexa kneeling before her with a hint of coming tears, sad and awed. Clarke feels, for a moment, divine. It reminds her of being back in that tent with that horrid man in front of her, knife in hand, and his pious attention to the slopes of her skin - but it is, at the same time, very different.

Where the Flayer looked at her with want to consume, Lexa seeks to worship - and this makes all the difference in the world.

Clarke’s skin doesn’t crawl with want for distance, but something in her chest lurches and burns in the face of Lexa’s obvious devotion. It is deep and warm, and without cost, and some part of her - the bloody, sickly part that slowly grew amidst acts of war - rebels.

 _‘You don’t deserve to be loved this way,’_ it says, but something sudden and contentious that sounds a lot like Lexa’s voice reminds her _‘That is not your choice to make.’_

And the truth - the thing that Clarke finds herself clinging to more and more these days in the moments when her memories of those weeks in the woods overwhelm her - is that she will take whatever Lexa has to give, no matter how much or how little, and do the best she can to pay it back in kind.

‘You do the most important thing, Lexa,’ Clarke whispers. ‘You make me want to live.’

Lexa sighs, lips parting slightly with the flow of her breath, eyes searching, wanting, always waiting, cheeks flushed warmly. There is nothing other than the sounds of their own breathing for a long, loaded moment, slowly synchronising, and then Lexa swallows thickly and says:

‘Kneeling here is kind of uncomfortable.’

With a small quirk of her lips, Clarke takes her hand back from Lexa’s curls and watches as the brunette gets back to her feet. For a few long seconds she considers reaching up again with her good hand and guiding Lexa back down to her - though, not near as far - to press Lexa’s swollen, split lip against her own. She imagines it - thinks, briefly, that perhaps it wouldn’t even make her sick at all to have that kind of contact just for a fleeting minute - but then a yawn works it’s way out of her mouth. Lexa looks at her with that outlasting, gentle affection and nudges Clarke’s thigh.

‘You’re tired,’ Lexa states, and rolls her eyes at Clarke’s wordless grunt of a reply.

‘Long day,’ Clarke agrees. ‘Lots of talking - about _feelings_.’

‘We all know how good you are at that,’ Lexa mumbles with a roll of her eyes. She steps back out of Clarke’s space and turns to circle the room, blowing out the candles one by one to cast the room into darkness.

‘Leave one for Nyle,’ Clarke calls, and earns a small noise of agreement. She shuffles back onto the mattress and spins, hoisting her leg up and around after the rest of her. By the time Lexa crawls onto the mattress beside her Clarke has already settled beneath her furs.

‘I’m sorry your mother did that - at dinner,’ Lexa mutters when they are laid parallel and facing one another in the dark. It’s odd not to have Nyle’s breathing echo back to them from across the room, and Clarke finds his absence slightly unsettling. Still - it’s nice to be alone with Lexa, just for a little while. ‘To press so publicly. It was not befitting of a _nomon_.’

‘It’s been a long time since she’s had to _be_ my mother,’ Clarke offers with a slight shrug. ‘Maybe she forgot how. Or maybe it’s just because of me. She hardly recognises me now.’

‘That’s her fault,’ Lexa says. ‘I recognise you. You are who you were when I met you - just stronger.’

‘I’m scarred.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ Lexa whispers, and reaches out towards Clarke’s mangled hand. She pauses an inch or so from touching and waits for Clarke to cover the last of the distance. ‘These things that you’ve lost do not make you less whole.’

It is Clarke’s turn to stave off tears, tired as she is, and she is forced to wipe an errant few away from her cheeks with her good hand while Lexa traces calloused fingers across the tender flesh of Clarke’s knuckles. After Abby’s horrified gaze on her scarred thigh the day before and Bellamy’s gaze fixed on her stumped fingers across the dinner table earlier - some kind of gross fascination with a slight mix of pity - Lexa’s ease is nothing short of freeing.

When Lexa’s fingers bend over what is left of her own, intertwining comfortably with what remains and pressing their palms together warmly, Clarke sighs all of the air out of her lungs and eases into the mattress. The stars are somewhere at her back, but Clarke’s eyes drift closed around the sight of tan skin and pink lips, the vibrant green of loving eyes - and it is infinitely more wondrous than the skies outside.

‘I think you should accept Magnus’s offer,’ Lexa says quietly. ‘With the _fisas_. Work. Learn. It’d be good for you.’

Clarke hums her agreement in silence that follows and lets sleep take her.


End file.
